DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 279

4 December, 2011

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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

We're in the final stretch of 2011 now, so soon, I will have to mentally note to write 2012 instead of 2011 whenever I need to write a date. Plus there's the whole world ending thing. A few interesting news items to go through, so let's get started.

There can't be a copyright section without discussing SOPA, and while the Internet public once again showed how awesome they are on American Censorship Day, what with the 80,000+ phone calls made to Congress, the fight is still very much on.

And that's the message Mozilla has been reminding people of this week, as they're hoping for another day of action next Tuesday, and want people to commit to calling their Senators to oppose the senate version of SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Like SOPA, PIPA aims to do the same things, by making tax payers responsible for protecting the outdated business model of the music and entertainment industries, and sacrificing the stability and safety of the Internet to do it. I don't like to discourage people from taking part, but I think we all know down in our hearts that these attempts will be futile, as Washington politicians are driven by their pursuit of corporate campaign donations, and have long since stopped fulfilling their duties to the people who actually put them in office (by voting, not buy paying for campaign ads). But it's the only option we have, and it's one we must exercise.

What I find most disturbing about SOPA/PIPA, or maybe just predictable, is not that the RIAA/MPAA are pushing for it, but the others supporters. The involvement of the US Chamber of Commerce, in particular, because their M.O. has been to be the public face for corporations to behind. In this case, I think Big Pharma are involved, and they're more interested in the counterfeiting part of SOPA. Counterfeit drugs should be stopped, as they're either dangerous, or they do violate the earning rights of pharmaceutical companies, or both. But what Big Pharma may really be trying to achieve with SOPA is to block cheap, but perfectly legal (at least in other countries), alternative drugs. In the end, it always boil down to money. To greed. The fact that is SOPA/PIPA is passed, and the US government will be able to seize domain names of websites that are "dedicated" to selling cheap drugs for those who can't afford it, and to force search engines to filter out results to these websites, is probably why Big Pharma are involved, why Pfizer was one of only 6 groups asked to testify at the SOPA hearings. We can also see Big Pharm's involvement via their political lap dogs, and one of the co-sponsors of the bill, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas has perhaps revealed too much this week in a written rebuttal of criticism of his beloved SOPA bill. Completely dismissing concerns about censorship and freedom of speech (it's not a core issue for our supposed democratically elected politicians these days), what interested me the most was how Smith chided Google for actively promoting "rogue foreign pharmacies that sold counterfeit and illegal drugs to U.S. patients", and Smith has a history of introducing or supporting bills that would benefit Big Pharma.

Smith, like many other clueless politicians before him, also once again linked web piracy to child pornography. "Like online piracy, child pornography is a billion-dollar business operated online. It is also illegal. That's why law enforcement officials are authorized to block access to child-porn sites," Smith wrote in support of introducing new laws to block online piracy. I find this statement quite incredible really. Does Lamar Smith of Texas think that the only reason law enforcement take action against child-porn sites is because it's a "billion-dollar business"? I think there are other issues involved, which Smith appears to not care about at all, such as the actual welfare of the exploited children perhaps? And any time a politicians tries to link web piracy to child porn, it doesn't elevate the seriousness of web piracy, it only serves to devalue the serious of child exploitation. So unless Rep. Smith really thinks that child porn is no more serious than college students downloading the latest Harold & Kumar movie, he should retract his statement, or face being accused of downplaying the seriousness of a truly heinous crime.

But while the moral opposition to SOPA/PIPA is well justified, and the technical opposition that has mainly focussed on the dangers of messing with DNS is also quite valid, one aspect overlooked is that, like most plans to stop piracy, SOPA/PIPA may just not work, particularly the highly controversial search engine filtering part! TechDirt dug up some stats that showed websites that will be prime targets for SOPA/PIPA, like The Pirate Bay, only rely on search engines for a small part of their overall traffic. So even if Google introduced a block to remove all results from all suspected piracy websites, the majority of web pirates would not be affected. And blocking the large sites on Google will just encourage many more smaller sites to take their place, to fill up the holes in the search rankings for terms that carry lots of traffic. And stopping thousands and thousands of smaller websites is going to be a lot harder than stopping a single The Pirate Bay (and we know rights holders don't want to do the work, so they're not going to track down each domain name and fill in the right forms to get Google to remove them), and this fragmentation will actually make web piracy easier. And this is actually the preferred scenario – the likely scenario is that malware sites will probably move in, and all those piracy newbs that don't know the domain name of the The Pirate Bay or don't know that you can type it directly into your browser, will get redirected to malware sites and billions will be lost as a result (see, I can make up monetary loss figures too).

And the DNS/IP filtering, as I've explained before, can be easily bypassed as well by people who don't mind putting in the extra work, and I'm never surprised at things people are willing to do for free stuff (I mean, just figuring out how to use BitTorrent, including port redirections and stuff, is much harder than switching to a non filtered DNS). And the group responsible for "defeating" Google's anti-piracy auto-suggest filter is back, as MAFIAA Fire releases a new add-on for Firefox called The Pirate Bay Dancing, which aims to circumvent blocking and filtering by randomly using one of thousands of proxy servers. It promises to work with any blocked site, even ones that are banned for political reasons, in countries that the US is now trying to emulate.

And it is all about the money. RIAA and MPAA money, and money from corporations in general, have corrupted the American political system, but the same money corrupts the copyright system too, it seems. This follows a breaking scandal in the Netherlands where, ironically, an anti-piracy firm stole the music it used in those anti-piracy ads you find at the start of DVDs, and it follows the plight of the poor artist trying to recoup what he's owed, only to come face to face with the corrupt copyright business. The composer, Melchior Rietveldt, was given a "deal" in which he would have to give 33% of his royalties to the boss of a royalty collection agency, or face the possibility of not getting any money back. So you have anti-piracy firms performing commercial piracy, and you have copyright licensing firms doing backdoor deals and pocketing the real artist's money for themselves.

Skipping ahead to gaming, but still within the topic of copyright, we have Sony revealing details about the memory card for its upcoming PlayStation Vita portable console, and once again, it's exactly what you would expect from a company like Sony.

The PlayStation Vita's memory cards will be yet again another Sony proprietary format, and if that wasn't bad enough, it's a new proprietary format that only works with the Vita – even Sony's own proprietary MemoryStick format was apparently not good enough. Sony says this has been for performance reasons, and that may be partly true, but everyone knows that security is the real concern here (if performance was such a big problem, then why not dictate that only class 10 high speed SD cards can be used, and perhaps even run a speed test on cards before they're allowed to be used on the Vita). By making the Vita memory card a proprietary format stuffed with DRM, and removing compatibility for the card to be used as a mass storage device (so that the card can only be accessed via Sony's proprietary software), Sony hopes that hackers can't use the memory card as a platform to launch a hack into the system, to avoid what did happen with the PSP.

But Sony's actions may have the opposite effect, as hackers will see this new system that appears to be harder to hack, and see it as a challenge. But if there's a way to use something, there's a way to hack it to do something else, and I don't think this will change regardless of how difficult you make it for legitimate gamers, now forced to pay a premium for Sony's memory cards ($120 for 32GB).

Following up last week's story about game retailers such as Steam and Good Old Games urging publishers to compete with pirates on service, not just on price, I have my own personal story this week with just how difficult paying customers have it compared to pirates. I purchased the game Sins of a Solar Empire a while back, it's a game that doesn't have DRM and I thought I would show my support (but mainly because it was on sale – pricing is still very important, more on that later). I had played the game a while back, but that was on XP, and now that I wanted to get the game running on Windows 7. While the game is DRM free, the full purchase process involves buying from Stardock's Impulse platform, which has recently been sold to GameStop, registering within Impulse to download the game – Impulse was not required when I originally installed the game in XP, as it was only needed for updates. The Impulse platform is an app like Steam, that allows you to purchase, download and organize your game collection. Unfortunately, the serial code for the game I had would not register on Impulse, and searching the web, this appears to be a common problem. The only solution is to email Impulse tech support, and that's what I did. But the problem is that it left me with a game that I purchased, that I wanted to play right now, and I'm unable to as a paying customer. So instead, I did what many would have done in my position – I downloaded a pirated version of the game, from a file hosting/sharing website without having to commit any illegal "uploads", so I could play it right away. It took Impulse tech support 3 days to answer my query, which was to provide a new serial that would register.

And pricing, I have to say, plays a big part in game purchases. And I'm not talking about must-have games, but rather, the games that you might think you're interested in, but not so much that you would want to pay full prices for. Right now, piracy seems to be the most popular way to get these types of games, but for me, the various Steam sales have become the better alternative. I've bought a lot of games just because they're cheap, and for $5, you can't really go wrong. It's this type of thinking and impulse buy that could drive the PC gaming market, and also prevent piracy (or monetize piracy, as downloaders "legalize" their pirated copies by buying a legit one on the cheap). I understand that you can't release new games at this low price point, but for games that have received less than positive reviews, the price drop should happen much more quickly than it does right now (to be fair, some publishers have already started embracing this principle – badly received games are often now purchased up despite the bad reviews if the price is right – that's money the publisher otherwise wouldn't have had, or wouldn't even deserve for publishing a bad game).

Alright, enough ranting for this week – gotta save something for next week. See you then.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

December 4, 2011	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.0.0
December 4, 2011	VidCoder 1.2.4 Freeware
December 4, 2011	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.3869 Beta Freeware
December 4, 2011	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.0.6 Freeware
December 4, 2011	DVDRemaster Pro 7.1.4
December 4, 2011	DVDRemaster Standard 7.1.4
December 4, 2011	Orb 3.16.0025 Freeware
December 3, 2011	VideoSpec 0.9.2 Freeware
December 3, 2011	CDBurnerXP 4.4.0.2838 Freeware
December 3, 2011	ProgDVB 6.80.1 Freeware
December 2, 2011	VSO Blu-ray to MKV Converter 1.4.0.8
December 2, 2011	VSO Blu-ray to DVD Converter 1.4.0.8
December 2, 2011	VSO Blu-ray to PS3 Converter 1.4.0.8
December 2, 2011	VSO DVD Converter 1.4.0.8
December 2, 2011	VSO Blu-ray to AVI Converter 1.4.0.8
December 2, 2011	VSO Blu-ray Converter Ultimate 1.4.0.8
December 2, 2011	Any Video Converter Free 3.3.1 Freeware
December 2, 2011	Lame Front-End 1.7 Freeware
December 2, 2011	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.3.2 Freeware
December 2, 2011	Windows 7 Codecs 3.3.2 Freeware
December 2, 2011	PotPlayer 1.5.30654 Beta Freeware
December 1, 2011	Cinema Craft Encoder SP3 1.3.0.11
December 1, 2011	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.9.5
December 1, 2011	PlayOn 3.4.28.2648
December 1, 2011	Machete 3.8
December 1, 2011	Ut Video Codec Suite 10.2.0 Freeware
December 1, 2011	LAV Filters 0.42 Freeware
November 30, 2011	AVIAddXSubs 9.10 Freeware
November 30, 2011	MediaLink 2.42
November 30, 2011	DVDx 4.0.1.0 Freeware
November 30, 2011	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.0.0 Freeware
November 29, 2011	TEncoder 1.4 Freeware
November 29, 2011	Plex Media Center 0.9.5.2 Freeware
November 29, 2011	MKVToolnix 5.1.0 Freeware
November 29, 2011	DV Scheduler 5.59 Freeware
November 29, 2011	LAME MP3 Encoder 3.99.3 Freeware
November 29, 2011	SubExtractor 1.0.2.1 Freeware
November 29, 2011	DVDStyler 2.1 beta 2 Freeware
November 29, 2011	BD Rebuilder 0.39.04 Freeware
November 28, 2011	TS-Doctor 1.1.46 Freeware
November 28, 2011	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.4.7 Freeware
November 28, 2011	Free 3GP Video Converter 5.0.2 Freeware
November 27, 2011	BDtoAVCHD 1.6.3 Freeware

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

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 280

11 December, 2011

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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

Welcome to, by my calculations, the third last WNR of 2011. "You've got to be joking", was a phrase that went through my mind quite a few times this week, while reading and writing some of the news items you'll read about below. What they say is true, real news is becoming more and more like Onion News these days, which is both funny and incredibly depressing all at the same time.

Let's not waste more of 2011, and let's started with this week's copyright rants. We start with a scary peak into the future, if the likes of SOPA and PIPA are made into law, with the story of website that was seized as part of last year's "Cyber Monday" seizures by the Department of Homeland Security.

I'll leave you to read the full story for all the details, but suffice to say, domain was seized on the instance of music industry executives, website owner argues fair use, government, probably knowing that they didn't have justification to make the seizure in the first place, stalls, and a full year later, domain name is returned to owners. Website ruined, financial costs incurred, and all for nothing.

The website in question was DaJaz1.com, who offered leaked music for downloads. The record labels told the government to seize the website, but the owners of DaJaz1.com says that the songs they linked to (not hosted) were often provided to them by employees of the record labels, for promotional purposes. But you have government agents too stupid to realise they've become pawns of the record (and movie) industry, too lazy to do any real research on the list of "bad" websites handed to them, and a justice system too biased towards rights holders. The full financial cost to DaJaz1.com is incalculable, and for most websites, being offline for a whole year basically means the end.

I do have my little theory about why the RIAA wanted DaJaz1.com shut down, as they also took down a few similar websites during the same operation. At its heart, the job of the RIAA companies is to help promote artists. But these days, the Internet can be leveraged by artists themselves for promotional purposes, and even music distribution, once relying on manufacturing/distribution/retail chain, can be all done digitally these days. In other words, there's little justification these days for studios to be taking as much from artists as they are, and for all the talk of web piracy, this is what scares the RIAA companies the most. So any website that helps artists to directly promote their work, generate hype by using leaked music, and thus bypassing the studio system, will be seen as a major threat. Maybe not today, but soon enough. And PIPA/SOPA will then allow the record companies to get their dirty hands around the Internet, close down websites that threatens their outdated business model.

But even if the mistake was just an innocent one, how many websites will have to become collateral damage in this un-winnable war against downloads, before a real innovative website, like the next YouTube, will be the ultimate victim (it if hasn't already occurred). The rights holders keep on saying that websites like YouTube getting blocked is hyperbole, and they may be right at present, because nobody is going to shut down YouTube without facing a mighty smashing courtesy of Google's legal hammer, but would YouTube have been so safe in its infancy had SOPA/PIPA existed then? People uploading copyrighted clips was what the early days of YouTube was all about, before people realised they could create their own videos and it would be even more popular than a re-upload of something people can get on BitTorrent anyway. While it is now the bastion of creativity, it once was a haven for pirates (at least according to Viacom, in their lawsuit against YouTube), and it might just fall into the "dedicated to piracy" category of SOPA/PIPA. And if YouTube had been destroyed back then, would the web, and creativity and innovation, and the economy, be better off, or much much worse off? Is this a risk we should be taking?

It seems many are finally realising that, SOPA/PIPA, is very very dangerous. And it was a pleasure to read the quotes attributed to the CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary Shapiro. Not only does the CEA produce the excellent CES exhibition, and represents all the major electronic manufacturers, it appears they've joined the anti-SOPA brigade as well. Shapiro used language that even I might be a bit scared to used in the WNR, for fear of appearing too biased, but he's absolutely right that SOPA will kill "innovation, wealth and jobs", and that SOPA is nothing more than "a bunch of Hollywood and music industry lobbyists destroying the Internet". Couldn't have put it better myself (really, I couldn't). I wonder if Sony, the only company to actually both belong to the pro-SOPA RIAA, and anti-SOPA CEA, might reconsider their CEA membership, although Shapiro did mention quite clearly that his views had wide ranging support amongst CEA members.

Other trade groups, some staunch supporters of SOPA, are also now reconsidering their support following the public backlash. The BSA, the anti-piracy lobby group for software makers, has in recent days, softened their support for SOPA, basically calling it overreaching. No doubt after many of their members complained about the group's position of a bill aimed directly at tech companies, and one which ultimately only benefits the music and movie industries. But if the BSA continues to even partially support SOPA, then other companies could join Kaspersky in withdrawing from the group in protest over SOPA. The threat to Internet security posed by SOPA is well known, but it's nice seeing a security company take a significant step in their protest of SOPA and the damage it could unleash on the Internet.

The MPAA has launched a stern defence of SOPA, by first attacking an alternate, less controversial bill as being too friendly to dirty old web pirates. As the MPAA was most likely the people who actually came up with SOPA, it's no surprise they aren't accommodating to any alternatives.  But the MPAA's Chairman, Chris Dodd, also added fuel to the fire with a couple of curious comments. First up, he question why Google is not accommodating when it comes to filtering search results, by saying "When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn't do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites."

That comment is simply too stupid to even come up with a reply, it would just be too easy to point out everything that's wrong with the statement (and at the same time, it's hard to resist point out the fact that Google pulled out of China for being forced to censor results, are we really comparing the US to China when it comes to web censorship, of all issues). To be fair to Dodd, he was probably referring to the technical aspects of result filtering, but it's one thing to filter the BBC or CNN, but it's another when you have to filter the thousands upon thousands of website the MPAA deems "bad", as well as pre-emptively blocking "red flag" sites.

But Dodd wasn't finished, because he had an analogy to share as well. Still referring to Google, he added "A guy that drives the getaway car didn't rob the bank necessarily, but they got you to the bank and they got you out of it, so they are accessories in my view". You see, in Dodd's scenario, Google is the getaway driver, while Internet users are the robbers, and the MPAA studios are the bank. Again, too stupid to pull apart, but … can't … resist. First of all, downloading a movie is not like a bank robbery, and I'm guessing it would be armed robbery as well. Downloading a copy of a movie, isn't the same as stealing real money from a bank either. And if Google has some role to play in the analogy, it is not the get-away driver. It's a stupid analogy to compare to downloading, because none the roles match up to anything related to downloading, but at best, the getaway driver would be the guy that transports or shares the burnt DVD copy of The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (in analogy: the bags of money) to your friends after it has been downloaded (in analogy: stolen at gunpoint), and even then, it doesn't really make much sense. As for Google's role in all of this? It's the phone book company that helped the robbers to find the bank they robbed. The ISP would be the manufacturer of the car or the people responsible for the roads. Are they all "accessories" too, Chris?

The RIAA has been busy too, "helping" copyright troll Righthaven. Or rather, they're trying to hurt Righthaven's opponent by making sure Wayne Hoehn and his lawyers do not win the case based on fair use issues, which could hurt the RIAA's stance (which is that there's not such thing as fair use). At the same time, the RIAA is also trying to hurt Righthaven's case by agreeing with the court that Righthaven don't have standing to sue, and because this automatically throws the case out, there's no need to consider the fair use issues. So the RIAA is basically out to hurt everyone in order to protect their own self interest, and you know, that's totally within their M.O, and I guess it is kind of "neutral" if you think about it, even though Hoehn's lawyers would disagree.

Speaking of fair use, the US Copyright Office entertains new suggestions for exemptions to existing copyright laws every couple of years, in the spirit of not allowing copyright to hamper innovation and consumer rights. A couple of years ago, the issue of smart phone jailbreaking was one of the exemption suggestions, and the US Copyright Office last year approved the exemption, to the disgust of Apple. Now, Public Knowledge and the EFF are submitting briefs that call for the exemption of DVD ripping and game console hacking. PK says that DVD ripping should be legal because so many devices these days don't have DVD drives any more (eg. the iPad), and so in order for consumers to watch the movies they purchased, they should be allowed to bypass CSS and the DMCA restrictions, and rip for personal use. Makes sense. EFF, following their successful application of the smart phone jailbreaking exemption, say the exemption should be extended to game consoles (probably muttering "take that, Sony" while they were preparing the brief). And it also makes sense, because the same issues exist for smart phones and game consoles, being able to run your own apps (like, oh I don't know, Linux), and both have issues with piracy if jailbreaking is allowed (but if it's okay for smart phones, then it should be okay for game consoles).

But perhaps the US Copyright Office should take note of the Swiss's decision to exempt "piracy" for all personal use. The Swiss government found that there was hardly any financial damage from piracy for personal use (as opposed to re-selling the pirated copies for profit), as people's spending on entertainment products have not been reduced, merely shifted to other things that can't be pirated, such as concerts or merchandise. And as there's no financial loss, the Swiss didn't feel it was right to have laws that hamper innovation, or help protect outdated business models. And they also made note that the industry's "Chicken Little" response to web piracy is not new, and that these industries should just get over it and find ways to profit from it. Remember when the music industry warned us that hope taping, on cassette tapes, would kill the music industry, and when the MPAA compared VCR taping to leaving a woman alone in a house with the Boston Strangler? Yeah, those industries.

I haven't had a HD/3D section for a while, so I thought I would add one for this issue. I could talk about the Black Friday sales week sales figures, which were somewhat disappointing for Blu-ray (only a 5% gain compared to last year's Black Friday), but I really wanted to rant about two, slightly disturbing trends, when it comes to Blu-ray.

The trailers you find at the start of discs is beginning to really annoy me, mainly due to the quantity present, and two (not so new) developments. I'm a big fan of movie trailers, evident by Digital Digest's growing collection of movie trailer downloads, but when you insert a disc to watch a movie, you don't want to have to skip through half a dozen trailers mostly for movies you've already purchased, or have no interest in. Luckily, most can be skipped, but there's the odd annoying one that can only be fast forwarded.

But the two developments are non movie related advertising, and BD-Live trailer downloads. The first one is particularly annoying, and a trend that has gotten worse in paid for content. I mean, I've already paid for the disc, or for the cable TV subscription, why should I still have to sit through ads? They're not even funny ads, or ads related to movies, or the movie in question, and that to me is unacceptable.

BD-Live trailers is also extremely annoying, as it uses your Internet connection to download an average quality trailer from the Internet to show you. Supposedly, this is to guarantee "fresh" trailers, but in reality, it's the movie studio's way to make you pay (via your Internet connection charges) for its own advertising. And the trailers aren't so fresh anyway, and sometimes you get the odd effect of having the same trailer show up twice. And again, it cannot be skipped, only fast forwarded.

Add these with the anti-piracy trailers, the "Blu-ray is a new format blah blah blah" disclaimer for badly produced, incompatible discs, the other disclaimers for commentaries and stuff, plus studio logos (which gets shown again at the start of the movie anyway), it's minutes wasted just so I can get to the movie I paid to watch. It's probably faster to download a pirated copy, than to sit through all of that crap without skipping, and they wonder why people pirate movies.

And on that rant, we come the end of another WNR. See you next week.

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3. Weekly Software Roundup

December 11, 2011	Vista Codec Package 6.1.1 Freeware
December 11, 2011	LameXP 4.04 Alpha 8 Freeware
December 10, 2011	DXVA Checker 2.6.2 Freeware
December 10, 2011	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.0.2
December 10, 2011	SubExtractor 1.0.2.3 Freeware
December 10, 2011	Subtitle Edit 3.2.3 Beta 1 Freeware
December 10, 2011	VideoCacheView 2.05 Freeware
December 10, 2011	XMedia Recode 3.0.5.6 Freeware
December 10, 2011	Windows 7 Codecs 3.3.5 Freeware
December 10, 2011	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.3.5 Freeware
December 10, 2011	ProgDVB 6.80.2 Freeware
December 10, 2011	BDInfo 0.5.8 Freeware
December 10, 2011	The KMPlayer 3.1.0.0 Freeware
December 10, 2011	PotPlayer 1.5.30820 Beta Freeware
December 9, 2011	Free 3GP Video Converter 5.0.3 Freeware
December 9, 2011	Lagarith Lossless Video Codec 1.3.27 Freeware
December 9, 2011	DeVeDe 3.20.0 Freeware
December 8, 2011	All My Movies 6.8 build 1319
December 8, 2011	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.9.6
December 8, 2011	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.0.7 Freeware
December 7, 2011	x264 VFW Codec Build 2120 Freeware
December 7, 2011	x264 r2120 Freeware
December 7, 2011	GoldWave 5.65
December 7, 2011	MeGUI 2066 dev build Freeware
December 7, 2011	rebox.NET 1.8.0.0 Freeware
December 6, 2011	BDtoAVCHD 1.6.4 Freeware
December 6, 2011	J. River Media Center 17.0.46 Beta
December 5, 2011	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.3884 Beta Freeware
December 5, 2011	MPEG-2 Transport Stream packet analyser 2.4.0.0 Freeware
December 5, 2011	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.3884 Freeware
December 5, 2011	Video Thumbnails Maker 3.2.0.0 Freeware
December 4, 2011	MKV Chapterizer 2.1.1.0 Freeware

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

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 281

18 December, 2011

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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1. Introduction

• Game Consoles - November 2011 NPD Sales Figure Analysis 

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2. Weekly News Roundup

As the holiday period truly begins (and by use of the term 'holiday', I'm not trying to avoid saying Christmas or in any way take part in the largely fictional "war on Christmas", rather as a shorthand for saying Christmas and New Year, and I guess having to explain it like this sort of negates the whole shorthand thing, but you can't be too careful these days) ... where as I, um, yes, as the holiday period begins, the news will dry up, and it's even debatable whether next week's issue of the WNR is still on or not. Regardless, the week before Christmas is also the last week in which the Copyright Scrooges can manoeuvre to get their beloved SOPA passed in Congress, and so it's busier than normal.

The US video game sales figures for November was also released during the week, and you can read the full analysis here.

Before we talk more about video games, let's go through the week's copyright news first. Once again, we see why money and politics shouldn't really mix, as news that two Congressional staffers largely responsible for drafting SOPA/PIPA have now "managed" to get better jobs at the MPAA and the National Music Publishers' Association, two copyright lobbying organisations.

While laws prevent these two from coming back and lobbying their former employees (as if that's even needed), there are the usual Washington loopholes that still allow the two to have influence on Capitol Hill. The MPAA and the NMPA will argue that this is how it's supposed to work, that the organisations have managed to secure the service of two very capable, and knowledgeable, people who are already familiar with the issues at hand. Everyone else will be made uncomfortable at yet another incident that highlights the incestuous relationship between lobbyists and politicians. While only the MPAA/NMPA and the two new employees will know what the real deal was, the reality is that the two helped to draft bills that (intentionally, or just incidentally) gave their future employers exactly what they wanted, convinced their old bosses to go along with it, and got new, higher paying jobs as a reward. Whether this was just the unintentional consequence of their actions, or something more troubling that involved more coordination between the involved parties, I don't want to comment, but sometimes just the appearance of something like this is unacceptable for a truly democratic society, or at least it should be.

With breaking (well, by the WNR's  standards anyway) news that further discussion of SOPA will have to wait until after the Congressional break, the anti-SOPA movement main gain an important ally before then, with Wikipedia threatening a day of action to protest the controversial copyright bill. The founder of Wikipedia, the man whose photo you see every couple of months on every Wikipedia page, Jimmy Wales, has suggested that Wikipedia might blank all of its pages, for a short period, to demonstrate against SOPA, something the Italian version of the encyclopaedia has already attempted to great success over a local issue. Right now, it's all just discussions, because, as Wales rightly points out, doing something like this could have a huge impact on the web. I mean, would somebody please think of the children … who have to write school reports, and what the hell would they do without Wikipedia (and the copy/paste function)? Use another online encyclopaedia, or heavens forbid, go to the library?

And for the anti-SOPA brigade (for all the work I've put into the cause, I must be a lance corporal by now, which ironically is also my rank in BF3 – I'm really really not good at the game), Christmas has come early thanks to Universal Music Group's Scrooge-tastic act that helped to prove why content holders cannot be trusted with the power to censor the Internet. The story begins with the YouTube upload of Megaupload's cheesy promotional video, starring some of today's biggest stars, such as Kim Kardashian, P. Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, and sung by Macy Gray. Using an original song, and with written agreements signed for all the stars, what Megaupload didn't expect was for Universal Music Group (UMG) to abuse YouTube's anti-piracy tool, to file an infringement report against the music video and have it censored. But that's exactly what UMG did, although they now deny they did it for copyright reasons, hinting at some unknown agreement between two private companies (possibly relating to recordings of live performances), YouTube and Universal. Not that this makes it any better, of course, as the end result is that a perfectly legal video that presented views that UMG did not approve of (or rather, they don't approve of Megaupload, period), and UMG had it taken down, which is the very definition of censorship. And because of an agreement between two other private companies (something SOPA would allow, as content holders can make agreements with financial providers to "kill" websites outside of the legal justice system), the tools/rules designed to handle copyright disputes was "abused" to censor free speech, however cheesy it was. What a wonderful demonstration of what a post-SOPA Internet world could be like.

Megaupload was quick to file a lawsuit against UMG, and YouTube eventually did reinstate the video with the explanation that, yes, UMG did abuse its tool: "Our partners do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they own the rights to them or they are live performances controlled through exclusive agreements with their artists, which is why we reinstated it."

But the Streisand Effect ensures just the YouTube version, which was blocked for quite a while, now has over half a million views, and made #Megaupload a trending tag for a while on Twitter. Nice one UMG. And who knew controversy is such a great way to promote a music video, perhaps it's something UMG can leverage to its own benefit the next time.

Speaking of promoting videos, very funny comedian Louis CK has done something that traditional media won't be laughing at – he's bypassing the normal distribution channels, and releasing his own video for $5, and without DRM. And it's proven to be somewhat of a success, with CK taking in over $200,000 (profit after cost) in just 4 days. According to CK himself, that's less than what he would have gotten from a traditional distributor, but he's happy because more people have managed to get a legal version of his video, and nobody had to endure horrible DRM or annoying marketing (register here, register there, give us all your personal info, and then get spammed in your inbox forever). Some have argued that this is a bad development for media distribution, since by taking out the middle men, that's fewer people being employed. And that argument has some merit, and I've long argued that the whole wholesale/distribution/retail chain will suffer, if it isn't suffering already, due to the digital revolution. But there are strategies to adapt, but those too slow, too paranoid or too stubborn to change, that is the companies that insist on charging digital downloads at the same price as retail boxed version, and those that insist on DRM, will not survive this revolution. And the more they try to hold on to the dying model, the more artists will release themselves from the clutches of traditional media and do it their own way – the truth is that nobody wants to do it alone, unless they have to, and through DRM, bad pricing, and incessant marketing and all the things they've done to alienate consumers, traditional media are forcing artists to go it alone.

For now, Louis CK's video is still selling, despite widespread piracy (not that DRM would have lessened it or anything), and Louis urges everyone to keep buying, as so he "can have shitloads of money".

And buying, as opposed to torrenting, might also help you avoid public embarrassment, as a new website has been launched to try and embarrass torrenters by listing their IP address and the stuff they've downloaded, even the videos of the naughty kind. While downloading from a public tracker does have this risk, those with dynamic IPs may not care too much, still, I don't think I can support any service that publishes data like this. It would be like if a website, say Google, decided to public its web logs, of which IP address searched for what and when, and that has huge privacy implications. Just because this website is seeking to expose illegal behaviour, doesn't mean it isn't a privacy violation.

With that said, it was funny that the website would be used to put anti-piracy groups under pressure, as opposed to the people who actually pirate. This is because the website allows you to search for any IP address, including say the IP address of movie studios, or anti-piracy lobbyists, or even the anti-piracy domain seizing Department of Homeland Security. It certainly was interesting to see staff at NBC-Universal downloading the excellent Game of Thrones, perhaps proving that network TV does know a good series when they see one, even if they don't actually know (or dare) to reproduce it for their own networks. How about someone at Fox downloading Super 8, produced by another studio? Or the RIAA downloading the latest Kanye West album?

Of course, the right argument is that you cannot really hold the RIAA responsible just because one of their IP addresses was used to illegally download something. It could be by an employee, an ex-employee, a visitor who managed to get access to a network connection, or as some have already claimed, be an unlikely case of IP spoofing. And as long as the RIAA has an appropriate anti-piracy policy, and enforces it, then they shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of individuals. But since the RIAA don't think any of this applies to, say Google or ISPs, and that they need to pass tough legislation to punish these organisations, I can only conclude that, yes, the RIAA is guilty of copyright infringement, possibly on a massive scale, and they should be punished accordingly.

Not much happening in 3D/HD, so let's skip to gaming. The NPD sales figures for November presented no big surprises in the Xbox 360 outselling everything else, and I think it's safe to say that it is currently the dominant console in the US, for this generation.

To be fair (or unfair), the PS3 is really the only loser in this generation, in the US or elsewhere, despite PS3 sales doing pretty well worldwide. I say this not to incite fanboy-on-fanboy violence, although that would be an effective way to cull their numbers, but simply because neither Nintendo nor Microsoft could have predicted their respective successes in this generation, which has come largely at the expense of the PlayStation brand. The fact that the PS3 will likely never outsell the PS2 is disappointing given the huge advantage the brand had over the offerings by Nintendo and Microsoft in the last generation, plus the advantage of also being a Blu-ray player (the DVD player in the PS2 being partially responsible for the unit's success).

It was also interesting to see Modern Warfare 3 break all sales records, despite a struggling economy, wide spread piracy and everything. I've only secured my (PC) version recently, and only because it was below retail pricing, so pricing is important as ever. One issue that's becoming more and more important is regional pricing, especially on Steam for non US buyers. Here in Australia, we get ripped off due to publishers (not Steam) setting higher prices than compared to say the US or the UK. This has led to others using VPNs to buy games from overseas (with the high risk of getting their Steam account banned), or buying from Russian based CD-key sites. It's a lot of trouble for people to have to go through just so they can hand money to game publishers, and it's easy to see why some might see piracy as a legitimate source for games, until prices drop to more reasonable levels. The globalised price competition is one of the downsides of a globalised marketplace for sellers, but they benefit from being able to access more markets and more customers than ever, and digital distribution strips away almost all of the manufacturing cost from things, so it should all even out in the end. But only if reasonable pricing policies are put in place, one that is fair to countries like Australia, and can also compete against piracy ($80 vs free is not competition, but $30 to make the guilt go away, plus access online services without fear of having an illegitimate key, might be).

I think that's enough for this week. See you next week (maybe).

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December 18, 2011	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.0.3
December 18, 2011	BDtoAVCHD 1.6.5 Freeware
December 18, 2011	Ut Video Codec Suite 10.2.1 Freeware
December 18, 2011	ClipWrap 2.4.7
December 18, 2011	AutoFrequency 1.4.0 Freeware
December 18, 2011	AVCHDCoder 11.12.17 Freeware
December 18, 2011	LameXP 4.04 Alpha 10 Freeware
December 18, 2011	SubExtractor 1.0.2.4 Freeware
December 18, 2011	ffdshow Rev. 4158 (generic/x64) Freeware
December 17, 2011	Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD 5.0.1.104
December 17, 2011	Vegas Pro 11 Build 511
December 17, 2011	WinFF 1.4 Freeware
December 17, 2011	BurnAware Free Edition 4.3 Freeware
December 16, 2011	Windows 7 Codec Pack 3.5.0 Freeware
December 16, 2011	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.10.0
December 16, 2011	GOM Video Converter 1.1.0.50
December 16, 2011	VDownloader 3.8.972
December 16, 2011	PotPlayer 1.5.30857 Stable Freeware
December 16, 2011	BD Rebuilder 0.39.06 Beta Freeware
December 16, 2011	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.1.0 Freeware
December 15, 2011	Any Video Converter Free 3.3.2 Freeware
December 15, 2011	RAD Video Tools 1.99n Freeware
December 15, 2011	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.3895 Beta Freeware
December 14, 2011	PEnGUIn Encoder MP4 0.98b6 Freeware
December 14, 2011	MediaCoder 2011 R10 5215 Freeware
December 13, 2011	ImTOO Video Converter Ultimate 7.0.0.1121
December 13, 2011	SolveigMM AVI Trimmer + MKV 2.0.1112.12 Freeware
December 13, 2011	MeGUI 2068 dev build Freeware
December 13, 2011	SubCreator 1.4.0.150 Freeware
December 13, 2011	GOM Player 2.1.36.5083 Freeware
December 12, 2011	FFmpeg 0.9 Freeware
December 12, 2011	Vista Codec Package 6.1.2 Freeware
December 12, 2011	LiVES 1.3.12 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 282

25 December, 2011

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to this Christmas Day edition of the Weekly News Roundup. I know I said that there might not even be an issue of the WNR this week, as the news might dry up, but it's actually turned out to be the opposite, so I have to spend Christmas Day writing the WNR in absolutely humid conditions, and also in the middle of a hail storm – looks like I've definitely not been nice this year!

Further evidence of me being naughty in 2011 is the fact that all I seems to be getting from the Steam "Winter" Holiday Sale's Great Fift Pile are lumps and lumps of coal. Other people are getting free games, or really useful coupons, but all I get is coal, and coupons for games I already have. Just in case anyone asks, here's my Steam profile, so you can check out the games I have and the ones I've been playing. Add me as a friend if you like, but I must admit that while I love Steam games, I've not been a very active member of the community (and I've only just figured out how to create a custom URL for my profile).

Anyhow, let's not waste too much time, as I'd hate to be still writing come Boxing/St. Stephen's Day. Starting with copyright news, let's first cover the fallout from last week's revelation that IP addresses belonging to the RIAA have been used to download pirated songs, movies and even software.

The RIAA responded to the allegations with that old excuse of "someone else did it". Having long argued that a single IP address is evidence enough to identify web pirates, the RIAA did not like being on the other end of the pointy stick, instead coming out with some vague explanation about "third party vendors" and the like. Did these "third party vendors" also only have a single intact arm?

But I'm going to do something controversial and believe in the RIAA's explanation. Large organisations often have IP addresses within a leased IP block that they provide to third party vendors in order to obtain some kind of service, and so the RIAA's excuse may very well be valid. Other organisations also caught recently came up with other explanations, such as their IP being spoofed, or that they were downloading only as part of research. And you know what, in the giving mood I'm in, I'm going to believe them all. Because all of these explanations, and some are improbable, are all not impossible, and this is why IP addresses should not be used as evidence of copyright infringement, without knowing the exact intent and establishing that significant downloading (and uploading) has actually occurred. You don't go ahead an charge a car's owner just because their car's plate identified during the commission of a crime – you investigate the owner, see if there's motive/intent, and of course, see if the car or the plate was stolen.

Before we get to all the SOPA stuff, which again dominated the week, let's continue the follow-ups to last week's stories. Louis CK's DRM-free experiment has had an update, and after 12 days of sales, Louis has revealed that sales have reached the million dollar mark (with a screenshot of a PayPal account with the said million dollars – better get the money out of there quick Louis, you know what PayPal is like). So that's a lot of money, despite rampant piracy, which just goes to show that piracy can never really be stopped, but you can still make decent money if you do the right things. The hype over the experiment has obviously increased the visibility of the show, which explains the high piracy rate, but for artists and performers, reaching people sometimes is just as important, if not more important, than actually making money. And through piracy, Louis CK might have just gained quite a few more fans, and that can only be good for business in the long run. And with Louis donating a large chunk of the money to charity, another large chunk to employees as a bonus, this experiment definitely has a happy ending (for Louis as well, as he's keeping $220,000 for himself to, in his own words, "do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business". If Louis wants to continue the experiment, perhaps the next time, he can use a "pay what you want" model like the Humble Bundles, as this may help to convert more pirates to payers, as $5, while not expensive, is still quite a lot for a lot of people in this economy to spend on comedy videos.

So while Louis, his staff, and his charities are all having a merry Christmas, there's been one naughty boy that's not having such a nice one. Righthaven's long, excruciating death continues this week, with news that their website's domain name has just been seized. And not only that, it may very well be auctioned off to pay creditors. If I had money, I would buy the domain name, and put up a DHS style seizure notice on it warning others from trying to profit using the sue-for-settlement approach. Maybe even linking to a cheesy video explaining why you're even just for thinking about getting into the sue-for-settlement business. And for Righthaven to lose their own domain name, when they've been (without standing) threatening to take away other people's domain names – I don't know if that's justice, or irony. Probably both.

Now for the SOPA stuff. With SOPA under intense pressure, the boss of the MPAA, former US Congressman and Senator Chris Dodd gets back to what politicians (and lawyers) are best at doing to defend SOPA: lying (or at least exaggerating the truth). Dodd, who recently said that China should a model the US should refer to for Internet censorship, now says that if we don't do something about piracy, the US could end up like Sweden, Egypt or Spain, where their local film industries are "gone". Not just shrunk, or hurt, but "gone". And of course, none of it is actually true. These countries still churn out tons of films, and in Sweden's case, films that have made more than a hundred million worldwide, which is rare for non US based films. Ever heard of `The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' or `Let the Right One In'? The original Swedish productions, which has "inspired" recent remakes, were all big hits. And both Egypt and Spain have produced more films in the last few years, not less (or at least up to 2011 for Egypt, when domestic conflict probably will have reduced film production). And this was probably the last notable defence of SOPA for the week, as the rest of the stories are all about the opposition to SOPA.

If the Internet is good at producing one thing, it's comedic music videos. And the anti-SOPA protest movement were enriched with not one, but two new protest songs this week. One is from activist Dan Bull, while the other is from the composer of the "Obama Girl" hit. This is the kind of creativity, the kind of freedom of speech, that may very well be endangered if SOPA is passed into law, because the very sites that help to host and promote these kind of original videos, will be the ones under attack by SOPA as the same platform will no doubt allow pirated content to be hosted as well (in fact, I think you can say that YouTube wouldn't have a been a hit without the pirated stuff there were dominant when the site was first launched).

Also joining in the protest was Scribd, a document upload and sharing website that has become incredibly useful as a way to embed documents the same easy manner as videos. But it too, would be under attack by SOPA, as it operates on a business model not too different from "rogue" sites such as Megaupload or Rapidshare. I'm sure there are lots of copyrighted content on Scribd, but SOPA punishes an entire website for the act of a very small minority of individuals (outside of the control of the website), and Scribd has a lot to lose if SOPA becomes law. Which is why on Wednesday, Scribd randomly censored words from billions of documents they hosted, to get the message out about SOPA and its impact on the Internet.

Joining Scribd on the potential list of sites that will be hurt by SOPA is Reddit, one of the Internet's largest communities. The general manager of the website says that if SOPA passes, then Reddit would probably have to close down, due to the legal requirement to make the website compliant with SOPA. With millions of new posts to go through, the team of roughly 11 staff, mostly engineers, would not be able to keep up with the moderation duties and there would be no choice but to close the website down. This is because, under SOPA, just a single bad link out of the millions of posts would be enough to mark the domain for seizure, and with millions and millions of posts, no doubt containing potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of links to infringing content, that's probably enough to mark the site as "dedicated to piracy" under the SOPA terms, and all that would be then needed would be a content owner to step up, say so, and Reddit.com would be gone. And then multiply that by however many user-generated websites there are on the Internet, and you can start to see the full damage that SOPA could cause.

But one tech company that has been outspoken in its support for SOPA has been domain registration and hosting company, GoDaddy. And ironically with Reddit being threatened, it was a post on Reddit that has now helped to reverse the company's stance on SOPA. A post asking for a boycott of GoDaddy quickly gained popularity, with the likes of the Cheezeburger company (as in "I can has cheezeburger"), and even Wikipedia, all threatened to move their domain registration from GoDaddy to other providers on the 29th. Facing the prospect of losing potentially thousands of customers, GoDaddy relented and dropped their support for SOPA, although they have not formally dropped their support for the equally dangerous Protect IP Act, so the protest could be still on.

And so GoDaddy joins the list of companies and organisations not backing SOPA, but it was company that should have never supported it anyway. But when the Heritage Foundation also expressed their disapproval of SOPA, that was my "WTF" moment of the week. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank, has been as pro-copyright as I can think of, so for them to speak out against SOPA, and as influential as they are amongst conservatives (having just hosted a presidential nominee debate for the Republicans), they must have had some serious reservations about SOPA. And they did, mainly with how the government will given the power to censor websites, and also search engine results, in effect, censoring the flow of information. Hopefully, Republicans in the House and Senate will now think twice about voting for SOPA, or face being chastised by the Heritage Foundation for being anti free speech.

And in the same news article that I wrote, there was also a bit about Ashton Kutcher coming out against SOPA, but he was never really going to support it, considering his profile on the Internet, and his involvement with start-ups.

But probably the best argument against SOPA, and one that even content holders can possible agree with, is that SOPA probably won't even work, despite the threat of collateral damage it poses. This week, we had the news of another Firefox add-on that looks set to defeat SOPA's DNS filtering before it's even launched, so for anyone serious about pirating, SOPA does nothing. Nothing except actually ensure that new DNS protocols, designed to prevent the billion dollar damages caused by DNS spoofing every year, cannot be implemented. As I've mentioned before, if the government was as serious about defeating Internet fraud as they are about helping to prop up a dying business model, then there could be a lot more economic gain to be made.

Okay, the rain is really coming down now, and the thunder appears to be getting closer. That's probably a sign I should end this edition of the WNR, before the power goes out.  Merry Christmas, and see you next week.

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December 25, 2011	XBMC media center Eden 11.0 Beta Freeware
December 25, 2011	VirtualDub 1.10.1 (Experimental Build 34703) Freeware
December 25, 2011	Video Thumbnails Maker 4.0.0.1 Freeware
December 25, 2011	Subtitle Edit 3.2.3 Beta 2 Freeware
December 24, 2011	Miro 4.0.4 Freeware
December 24, 2011	Chapter Grabber 5.2 Freeware
December 24, 2011	ffdshow Rev. 4194 (generic/x64) Freeware
December 24, 2011	XMedia Recode 3.0.6.0 Freeware
December 24, 2011	LameXP 4.04 Alpha 12 Freeware
December 24, 2011	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.3.6 Freeware
December 24, 2011	Windows 7 Codecs 3.3.6 Freeware
December 24, 2011	MediaCoder 2011 R10 5220 Freeware
December 24, 2011	BDedit 0.40
December 24, 2011	MediaPortal 1.2.2 Freeware
December 24, 2011	BSplayer 2.61 Freeware
December 23, 2011	AC-3 ACM Codec 2.1 Freeware
December 23, 2011	PlayOn 3.4.30.2697
December 23, 2011	GraphStudio 0.4.5.5 (GraphStudioNext) Freeware
December 23, 2011	MPEG-2 Transport Stream packet analyser 2.4.1.0 Freeware
December 23, 2011	TEncoder 1.5 Beta Freeware
December 22, 2011	PotPlayer 1.5.31006 Beta Freeware
December 22, 2011	DivX Codec (DivX Plus) 8.2.1
December 22, 2011	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.10.1
December 22, 2011	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.0.4
December 22, 2011	J. River Media Center 17.0.59 Beta
December 22, 2011	LAV Filters 0.43 Freeware
December 21, 2011	GOM Video Converter 1.1.0.51
December 21, 2011	Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 4.7 Freeware
December 21, 2011	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.0.8 Freeware
December 21, 2011	DVDStyler 2.1 Freeware
December 21, 2011	ProgDVB 6.80.3 Freeware
December 21, 2011	KMPlayer 3.1.0.0 R2 Freeware
December 20, 2011	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.3904 Freeware
December 20, 2011	My MP4Box GUI 0.5.6.0 Freeware
December 20, 2011	MediaInfo 0.7.52 Freeware
December 19, 2011	Ut Video Codec Suite 10.2.2 Freeware
December 19, 2011	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.3899 Beta Freeware
December 19, 2011	MKVToolnix 5.2.0 Freeware
December 19, 2011	kmttg v0p8m Freeware
December 19, 2011	madVR 0.80 Freeware
December 19, 2011	SMPlayer 0.6.9.3645 unstable Freeware
December 19, 2011	MeGUI 2069 dev build Freeware
December 18, 2011	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 1.4.3

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 283

1 January, 2012

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Happy New Year! Hello from the 2012 side of the world, Australia being one of the first countries to go over to the other side, but you'll all join me soon enough, whether you like it or not. Having experienced about 18 hours of 2012, I have to say that it has been pretty boring so far. No cataclysmic events so far, but I'll keep you posted.

I guess it would be customary, at the end of the year, to review the year and summarise the major events. But that would require actually remembering what happened when I can barely even remember writing last week's WNR. It should also be a time to look forward to the brand new, still in shrink wraps, year, and make some bold predictions about 2012. But that would require insight and imagination, and both are in short supply in this 36 degrees (that's 97F) heat.

With the award season upon us soon, I guess I can format this WNR "a look back" in similar fashion, but without spectacular musical numbers, or comedic writing. So basically an award show without any of the interesting bits. Sounds like a great idea!

There has been many deserving winners of the prestigious Loser of the Year award, from Sony's PSN SNAFU, to recent events involving GoDaddy being pwned by Reddit, but there can only be one winner, and of course, it's Righthaven. The group that helped to redefine the term Copyright Troll has had a horrible year, not only losing court cases, but eventually their shirt (and domain name), as the company is now on the verge of bankruptcy.

Competition for the always popular Villain of the Year award has been fierce this year, as individuals and companies fight to be total d*cks (hint: not "docks" or "ducks"), in the field of copyright, gaming and beyond. But this year's award winner is neither an individual, nor a company (and it's not a duck either). It is, of course, SOPA – the always controversial Stop Online Piracy Act stormed to a clear lead in the voting for the award, at the very last minute. SOPA has managed to unite all against it, be it the conservative Heritage Foundation, Republican as well as Democrats, and even the sworn blood enemies, Reddit and 4chan, and that's quite an achievement.

The Best Blu-ray of the Year award goes to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, mainly because it was split into two parts and both parts still managed to not only get released in the same year, but both also topped the sales charts. Star Wars just misses out due to a point deduction for George Lucas being a d*ck (hint: not a duck, named Howard or otherwise).

The Best Game of the Year should probably go to the best seller, which would be Modern Warfare 3, but that wouldn't be fair to the game that everyone is talking about. The amazing world of Skyrim has drawn in gamers, who have spent hours upon hours arrowing people, and assorted creatures, in the knee, and as a result, would have been responsible for breaking up thousands upon thousands of relationships if only gamers had real life relationships with the opposite (or same) sex.

And finally, the Hero of the Year award goes to, in a lame effort to appease my readers, You! For helping to fight SOPA and to punish companies for not agreeing that SOPA is the worst thing to happen to the Internet since Rickrolling, for not buying into the Ultraviolet hype that, I have to admit, I was sucked into when I first heard the phrase "your movie library in the cloud", for putting up with Sony's PSN outage and that $600 invoice for adult toys that hackers charged to your account when your details were stolen from PSN, for fighting the likes of Rigthhaven and US Copyright Group and actually winning, and most courageously of all, for keeping on reading when I went on rant after rant. You're a deserving winner!

And as you can probably guess by now, it wasn't exactly a very newsworthy week. The only real notable piece of news was the GoDaddy anti-SOPA boycott, which Digital Digest was proud to join in, having moved 22 domains out from GoDaddy. It would be easy to feel sorry for GoDaddy right now, as there's almost nothing they can do or say to repair the damage caused by their ill advised support for SOPA in the first place – even their statement of "we oppose SOPA" was attacked by people claiming the company was opposing SOPA for the wrong reasons (not because SOPA is bad, but because GoDaddy was losing money because of supporting SOPA). Namecheap, hosting the Move Your Domain Day event by offering discounts to people who move their domains out of GoDaddy, managed to raise $64,180 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, $2 for every domain transfer – not bad work for a day, considering how much of a pain moving a domain (especially an active, website hosting one) is.

And that was it for the week really, so I probably shouldn't babble on, on this day which most of you will be nursing hangovers of varying degrees. So there's nothing left to do except to wish you a great new year, a prosperous one, a safe one, and one that's heaps better than the awful, awful, 2011. See you next week.

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December 31, 2011	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.0.7
December 31, 2011	AviDemux 2.5.6 Freeware
December 31, 2011	Collectorz.com Movie Collector For Mac OS X 8.0 build 3
December 31, 2011	WinMPG Video Convert 9.2.9
December 31, 2011	PotPlayer 1.5.31146 Beta Freeware
December 30, 2011	DeVeDe 3.21.0 Freeware
December 30, 2011	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.11.0
December 30, 2011	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 5.6.0 Freeware
December 30, 2011	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.1.0 Freeware
December 30, 2011	LameXP 4.04 Alpha 13 Freeware
December 29, 2011	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.4.8 Freeware
December 29, 2011	BD Rebuilder 0.39.07 Beta Freeware
December 29, 2011	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.1.1 Freeware
December 29, 2011	Q DVD Author 2.3.0 Freeware
December 29, 2011	SMPlayer 0.6.10 Freeware
December 28, 2011	AVCHDCoder 11.12.27 Freeware
December 28, 2011	CopyTo 5.0.1.2
December 28, 2011	ffdshow Rev. 4206 (generic/x64) Freeware
December 28, 2011	MeGUI 2070 dev build Freeware
December 27, 2011	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.3917 Beta Freeware
December 27, 2011	WinFF 1.4.0 Update Freeware
December 27, 2011	DVDStyler 2.2 beta 1 Freeware
December 27, 2011	ProgDVB 6.81 Freeware
December 25, 2011	Star Media Center 1.02 Freeware
December 25, 2011	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.85.0 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 284

8 January, 2012

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to yet another edition of the WNR. It was either still a relatively quiet week, or that I just haven't gotten back into "work mode" yet. I actually made two new year resolutions this year, one was to work hard, the other was to play hard. A week later, I've definitely managed to follow through on at least one of those resolutions.

In any case, we should be able to get through this one rather quickly.

And as all of the news were copyright related, this should make things go even quicker – we'll start with the SOPA related ones. Having forced a policy change at GoDaddy, albeit one that's still not 100% convincing, Reddit users have now decided to target politicians that support SOPA as their anti-SOPA next move.

There are quite a few politicians to choose from though, considering most of them seem to support SOPA or the senate version, PIPA. But with a few key SOPA backers not facing re-election, Reddit has decided to make an example out of rising Republican star Paul Ryan, even though he may not actually fully support SOPA. Despite Ryan's spokesperson coming out and clarifying the Congressman's stance on SOPA, or rather, some expertly crafted political language that implies fence-sitting without actually coming out and saying so, Reddit plans to get Ryan's opponent, Democrat Rob Zerban, elected at the next election. A fantastic result if they can do it, but the successful completion of Operation Pull Ryan will not be easy. Bigger than the issue of SOPA for the Reddit people taking part is Paul Ryan's controversial budget plan, as well as his support for the equally controversial National Defense Authorization Act.

But the truth is that Ryan's fence-sitting wouldn't have been needed just a few month ago, when SOPA was widely supported by politicians on both sides of the aisle. And that's progress, I suppose. The popular uprising on SOPA shows that people can affect political change, and while SOPA may still get passed, those in the US still retain the right to punish those who openly supports SOPA at the next election. But as expected, it's perhaps the industry and monied interests that are having the most effect on the weakening political support for SOPA. We already know that most tech companies are against it, but this week, it was revealed that the major gaming companies, who have long complained about web piracy, are also withdrawing support for the controversial bill. Microsoft have already distanced themselves from SOPA (and may have even been secretly working behind the scenes to get others to come out again SOPA), but now, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and even Sony Electronics, have apparently withdrawn themselves from the official list of supporters for SOPA as well (Sony music is still very much a supporter). Now, the cynical side of me says they're only doing it to avoid the negative attention SOPA is receiving, perhaps very much the same reasons behind GoDaddy's change of heart, but maybe that's the best we can expect from companies like them. Not supporting SOPA is not as good as being all out against SOPA, but at least it's better than supporting SOPA. And if there's one positive to come out of this whole mess, it's probably the realization by many of the real power of the Internet, how it can empowered anyone to make a stand on issues that affect them. And that's even more reason to fight SOPA and help protect the valuable tool that is the Internet.

At the heart of the argument *for* SOPA is the economic damage caused by web piracy, but it's been common knowledge that the entertainment industry frequently stretches the truths when it comes to publishing "losses" figures. So when the MPAA made the statement that they estimate there to be $20.5 billion in losses due to piracy every year, it came as no surprise to people that what most likely happened was that the MPAA simple multiplied the number of illegal downloads by the full retail cost of each piece of content. But what most didn't know was that the MPAA's figure manipulation went even further, by double and sometimes even triple counting the already exaggerated figures. If you have a $10 DVD, in which $2 goes to the manufacturer, $2 goes to the transportation company, and another $2 goes to the retailer, then the MPAA (or rather, the group the MPAA tasks with making the calculations, the Institute for Policy Innovation) calculates the loss by a clever bit of maths: $10 + $2 + $2 + $2 = $16. This is an  absurd way to calculate losses (that people downloading a $10 DVD costs the economy $16), as this kind of methodology is usually reserved for calculating changes in output and employment.

The MPAA also fails to take into account that SOPA doesn't affect non US visitors visiting non US websites, and most importantly, it fails to realise (or deliberately ignores) the fact that just because people save money by illegally downloading movies, it doesn't mean they don't spend the same money on other parts of the economy. In fact, with the economy so bad and so many families struggling, perhaps the most simple explanation for piracy is that people just don't have the money to buy movies, preferring to spend all their money on things like food and rent instead (which means they still contribute 100% of the earnings back to the general economy) . In the past, they simply stopped watching movies, now, they don't have to make that sacrifice as long as they can still afford a cheap-ish Internet plan. But even if the bad economy isn't to blame, then there are so many different (and some would argue, better) entertainment choices out there, such as video games, that people may simply be shifting their resources towards other parts of the economy. Regardless, the net effect of web piracy might be zero for the overall economy if people have not been hoarding money or throwing it away, although the loss for the affected entertainment companies is still very real.

But that's what's actually most wrong about SOPA. It will cost tax payers 10 million dollars a year to maintain the bureaucracy for handling SOPA, and to provide pro bono legal services for billion dollars companies, courtesy of the Department of Justice. And even after all that,  it may not help the overall economy at all, even if it worked to stop piracy (which it won't). And that's also if we don't count the cost of damaging the Internet, innovation and other industries. It ends up being corporate welfare for the music and movie industry, and in the end, it will benefit nobody, not even the very same industries that will be better served in the long term by embracing innovation.

And the industry should also take a long hard look at itself and see if there are any reasons within for their current problems. With box office receipts down in 2011 compared to the record breaking 2010, it would be easy to blame piracy. But piracy is very likely not the cause of the relatively small 3.5% decline, at least not according to film expert Roger Ebert. Ebert's opinion is that the decline in revenue is largely due to the lack of a blockbuster the likes of The Dark Knight or Avatar, the high cost of going to the movies (3D and refreshments), and the greater choice people have these days when it comes to watching movies (whether it's at home with Blu-ray on their big screen TV, or via Internet services such as Netflix). The MPAA always seem to believe they "deserve" ongoing revenue increases, but it's only sensible to accept that this will most likely not be the case, given how much choice people have these days. Although with that said, I think 2012 will be another record breaking year for Hollywood (assuming the world doesn't end) – what with The Hobbit, the Alien prequel Prometheus, a new Bond film and The Dark Knight Rises. And the music industry should stop conning people about its losses, which are almost 100% to do with the shifting buying habits of music lovers, from CD albums to digital tracks (the industry used to derive almost 90% of its revenue from album sales), and also the improving indie scene (thanks in some degree to the Internet).

That's all the news I have this week unfortunately, I apologise if you were expecting more. I think there will be much more next week, not just because CES 2012 starts either, but due to everyone waking up from their holiday hibernations. See you next week.

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

January 8, 2012	MKVExtractGUI-2 2.2.2.7 Freeware
January 8, 2012	AutoFrequency 1.4.1.436 Freeware
January 8, 2012	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.85.1 Freeware
January 8, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.3.8 Freeware
January 8, 2012	LAV Filters 0.44 Freeware
January 8, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.1.1
January 8, 2012	CDBurnerXP 4.4.0.2905 Freeware
January 8, 2012	Ut Video Codec Suite 10.2.3 Freeware
January 7, 2012	VideoSpec 0.9.3 Freeware
January 7, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.3.7 Freeware
January 7, 2012	kmttg v0p8n Freeware
January 6, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.31393 Beta Freeware
January 6, 2012	BDtoAVCHD 1.7.0 Freeware
January 6, 2012	Zoom Player Home Professional 8.1
January 6, 2012	Zoom Player Home MAX 8.1
January 6, 2012	Zoom Player Home Free 8.1 Freeware
January 6, 2012	FFmpeg 0.9.1 Freeware
January 6, 2012	Serviio 0.6.1 Freeware
January 6, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4225 (generic/x64) Freeware
January 5, 2012	PlayOn 3.4.31.2725
January 5, 2012	AvsPmod 2.2.1 Freeware
January 5, 2012	LameXP 4.04 Alpha 14 Freeware
January 5, 2012	MeGUI 2087 dev build Freeware
January 4, 2012	Muxman Pro 1.4.2
January 4, 2012	BluffTitler 8.3.1.3
January 4, 2012	MediaCoder 2011 R10 5221 Freeware
January 4, 2012	Avanti 0.6.4 Freeware
January 4, 2012	Windows 7 Codec Pack 3.6.0 Freeware
January 3, 2012	MkvToMp4 0.218 Freeware
January 3, 2012	MKVToolnix 5.2.1 Freeware
January 3, 2012	BurnAware Free Edition 4.4 Freeware
January 3, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.3933 Beta Freeware
January 2, 2012	Free 3GP Video Converter 5.0.4 Freeware
January 2, 2012	Nero Digital Audio Decoder/Encoder (AAC Codec) 1.5.4.0 Freeware
January 2, 2012	RipBot264 1.70.0 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 285

15 January, 2012

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

• Game Consoles – December 2011 NPD Sales Figure Analysis 

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Just as I predicted, this last week turned out to be quite a busy one. On top of the CES announcements, SOPA developments, there was also the latest NPD figures, for video game sales in the United States for the month of December. I wrote up the analysis of it yesterday, and the consensus seems to be that the video game industry is in trouble. Sure, December sales were quite disappointing, notably for Nintendo, but if you add up sales for both November and December for the other two companies, sales were actually up compared to a year ago. The Wii's decline is not totally unexpected though, an innovative control system aside (which is no longer unique, or the most innovative), the other parts of the system, particularly the online and multimedia parts, are just not good enough any more. People now expect game console to do more, thanks to the healthy competition between the Xbox 360 and the PS3, and the Wii simply no longer delivers.

There's plenty more to through though, so let's not waste more time.

In copyright news, we start with an update to last week's story about Reddit's campaign to dislodge Rep. Paul Ryan for his SOPA support. With the campaign only just starting, it's already had an immediate effect, with Ryan this week coming out with a definitive statement on SOPA, and promising to vote against the bill if it comes up in the house.

But the Pull Ryan campaign is not about to unveil a "Mission Accomplished" banner on an aircraft carrier, not just yet, as the movement seeks to expand its goals to force other legislators to take the same stance.

Recent developments may mean Ryan's new stance may change once more, now that the backers of the bill, Rep Lamar Smith (who, this week, has been caught in his own copyright scandal, as his website may have committed a copyright violation in regards to the use of an image), and his Senate counterpart, Sen. Patrick Leahy, have signalled their intention to remove the DNS filtering provision of SOPA (and PIPA). There's no denying this is a victory in the ongoing fight against SOPA, but it's also a wise political move by Smith and Leahy, by removing the most controversial section of SOPA, the one area in which there seems to be universal opposition to (apart from the likes of the MPAA, of course, which came out defending DNS filtering). And in typical Washington fashion, the door was left open for DNS filtering to be put back in, at some later time when people might not be as worked up about SOPA as they are now.

In other words, the fight against SOPA continues, because as bad and dangerous as DNS filtering is, the other parts of SOPA (and PIPA) aren't much better either. Even with DNS filtering removing, the bill would still give the government, and the entertainment industry, way too much power to take down websites, block IP addresses, sue website owners, financially assault websites, and force search engines to censor the Internet. Don't be fooled by this latest back down – the fight must continue!

In late breaking news, which I'll cover in more detail next week after some more careful analysis (hah!), remember that petition that more than 50,000 people signed on the White House website asking for SOPA to be opposed? The way the White House's petition website worked is that, if a certain number of signatures were recorded, the White House promised they would release an official statement on the petition topic. And just today, the White House did just that. Some sections of the media have already reported this as a big win for the anti-SOPA movement, but having quickly read the response, it's not exactly an overwhelming rejection of SOPA, nor is it a promise to veto the bill by the President's office (and to be fair, neither of these responses was likely to be forthcoming from a White House that has been pro-copyright from day one). The only part of SOPA that the White House clearly comes out against is ironically the part that has just been removed – the DNS filter provisions. The direct quote from the response on DNS filtering is as follows:

Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.

The rest of the response provides only vague clues about the White House's official position on SOPA, with promises to continue "vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation", but also containing phrases like "existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders". For what it's worth, the organizer of the petition and random signers are being invited to a conference to discuss the issue further, a bit of good PR, but the cynic in me still believes one or both of SOPA and PIPA will get passed, with most of it intact, and once the storm blows over, the rest will get added back in.

But if the SOPA impasse continues, Sega may have found a new way to solve the problem: do a hard reset! That was the answer given to a gamer via email when he asked Sega what their position on SOPA was, you know the generic tech support answer for solving an unknown problem: reboot. It's unfortunate that Congress and the Senate can't be rebooted, not until November anyway.

In the latest Righthaven development, the firm's domain name has been sold for $3,300 by the court appointed receiver to the Switzerland based Stefan Thalberg. The domain name now points to a website with the intriguing title "Take Back the Right(Haven)", and with the even more tantalising hint (which can be viewed via the HTML source code) of "Does your current provider possess a spine?". Time will tell what it all means. Meanwhile, more of Righthaven's assets will be put up for auction soon, as the appeals court rejects the firm's last minute pleas for mercy.

Last week, I reported on the way the MPAA report piracy losses, and how they may be double or even triple counting losses based on figures that were already exaggerations. The MPAA strikes back this week, by claiming triple counting is a perfectly reasonable way of counting piracy losses, and once again compared piracy to shoplifting. The MPAA also attacked tech blog Ars Technica for `Challenging Efforts To Curb Content Theft', which might just become illegal if SOPA is passed. Of course, blogs like Ars Technica, TorrentFreak, and even this one, do challenge efforts to curb piracy, but only those that are simply unreasonable – whether's it's intrusive DRM, or taking away people's rights to free speech and privacy, or suing individuals for millions of dollars. The MPAA would be wise to not equate opposition to unreasonable copyright protection, to opposition to all copyright protection, because if they come up with a reasonable model to reduce piracy, for example, by making content more available, with less restrictions, and at the more reasonable price, the kind of things that people have been calling for, then we would not oppose them. And it's exactly this kind of hyperbole, the "you're either with us or against us" attitude, the "billion dollar" worth of damages that they keep on quoting (despite their rebuttal clearly stating they know exactly what those figures they keep on quoting actually means, that they are used as a measure of change in activity, rather than actual estimated losses), the use of the term "theft" when "potential lost sale" is a much more appropriate term (theft, including car theft and shoplifting, usually doesn't leave the original item untouched), which makes people dismiss the industry's attempts to find a solution to the web piracy problem. But maybe the truth is just not as sexy, but rather paints a picture of a well off industry that creates most of its own problems by being too reluctant to embrace change (remember when the MPAA came out comparing VCRs to the Boston Strangler, or when the RIAA said home taping would kill the music industry?).

And ignoring research which doesn't fit into their agenda isn't helping either. When NBC Universal hired research firm Envisional to conduct research on the effects and causes of web piracy, the firm came up with some conclusions that did not fit into the usual message about web piracy (in that web pirates are criminals, robbing the poor old struggling entertainment industry of money and jobs). They subsequently chose to cherry pick the parts of the research that they did like, so they could continue on with their Chicken Little "sky is falling" scare campaign, ignoring the most poignant aspects of the research results. What Envisional found was that the industry themselves were to blame for a lot of the problems associated with web piracy, such as the lack of legitimate content, the lack of support for overseas markets, and pricing problems. And at the CES, Envisional's head of piracy intelligence, David Price, reiterated the fact that the industry has to do a lot more before it can blame everyone else for their woes. Price cites Netflix as the right way to combat piracy, as it's already had a huge effect on the number of people using BitTorrent networks, but only in the United States where the service has only been available until recently. Netflix, just like iTunes, has come about by not fighting the Internet, but by embracing what it brings, and it's interesting that neither solutions were industry created solutions, but comes from the same tech sector that the entertainment industry now want to curb via legislations such as SOPA. The industry's fear of change has only benefited those that dared to innovate, it seems.

And it's not just fear, but greed also, that's contributing to their downfall. Instead of making legitimate content as widely available as possible, for reasonable prices, movie and TV studios have tried using DRM, region controls and other methods to divide up the world into multiple markets, so they can extract as much money from each market as possible. While this brings them more money in the short term via exclusive and timed deals, the real effect is that some consumers no longer have the legal option to obtain new content in timely fashion, and at a price that's fair. For example, here in Australia, we have to wait months for new episodes of TV shows to get down here, and for games, we have to pay double or sometimes triple the prices people pay in the US or the UK. Before the Internet, people simply just had to put up with this. But there are so many choices now, and the so the real long term effect of their short term policies has been to push people toward these alternatives. VPNs allows Australians to access US content faster and cheaper, while overseas shopping websites allow imports at reasonable prices, taking away business from local retailers. And of course, there's piracy, illegal as it may be, but still an alternative for many.

And things like DRM, region control, and even legislations like SOPA, have been the industry's response to people's acceptance of alternative choices, and the industry continues to hamper the new legal alternatives (such as having release delay windows for Netflix and Redbox) under the guises of fighting piracy. All in an ultimately vain effort to protect their dying business models, by attempting to put the genie back into the bottle, by rolling back innovation.

At the end of the day, money talks (as we stealthily move the discussion to the high def section). DEG (The Digital Entertainment Group)'s latest home video figures confirm exactly what I've just been talking about, that the Internet has drastically changed the way people consume content, and it's only going to get "worse" for the industry if they do not adapt. Digital distribution revenue was up 55% for 2011, while physical media sales were down 13% – the industry's revenue as a whole declined 2%. The revenue now earned by the likes of Netflix and Redbox could have easily been retained by the studios themselves, if only they had the foresight to see the potential of the Internet.

And even when the industry tries to innovate, like with UltraViolet's cloud based movie storage, their own greed and insecurities are again their biggest enemy. UltraViolet, something that I think almost everyone agrees is a good idea on paper (the ability to buy a movie, as opposed to the media it comes on, and having a cloud stored copy that you can download or stream to your multiple devices), has been crippled by DRM, with each studio greedily attempting to promote their own distribution service, as opposed to working together on a single platform to make it easier for consumers. Just the fact that Disney is going out on their own and coming up with their own digital locker service, as opposed to joining the UV coalition like the other five major studios, shows how insecure and greedy they can be. It's not exactly Blu-ray vs HD DVD, but it may actually be worse, with each studio preferring their own distribution service for UV (or their own version of UV), whether it's WB via Flixster, Sony via the PSN (maybe), or the unknown studio that has just teamed up with Amazon – when the sensible solution is to use Netflix (and iTunes, if only Apple could have been convinced to join the UV coalition) or to come up with a new distribution service all UV partners would use. Netflix, sensing the confusion, may actually be withdrawing from the UV coalition, possibly to pursue their own version of the service (which all the studios will probably have to use when they've managed to destroy UV due to their own selfish interests).

Still, UltraViolet was a big topic at the CES. The most interesting announcement so far, other than Amazon's participation, was the Samsung Blu-ray player that would somehow convert discs to digital. People can insert their favourite movie, and through a couple of clicks of the remote, buy or redeem the UltraViolet version, with technology that would be able to tell the difference between a legitimate store bought version, and rental/pirated versions. I don't think charging people for yet another version of a movie they already own would be that popular, since I think if the best idea behind UltraViolet was the one that allows people to finally buy movies, instead of a version of the movie on a particular media. In my opinion, people who already have a legitimate DVD or Blu-ray should be given a free copy in the UV cloud. This may be hard to achieve though for existing discs, since many lack an unique identifier that can prevent a group of people sharing a single store-bought copy, and then getting the UV version without paying for the content, but surely this should be possible for all future copies pressed. Just add an unique identifier for each disc that can be linked to your single UV account (with each UV account being able to support multiple devices you own/have access to), and once that disc is inserted, the Blu-ray players reads the identifier, automatically registers online with your UV account, and your UV copy is available to use. It shouldn't be any more difficult that that, really.

Make it easy for the consumer, and the money will come.

And on that note, we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you've enjoyed this one, and see you next week.

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January 15, 2012	Burn4Free 5.8.0.0
January 15, 2012	Codec Tweak Tool 5.1.2 Freeware
January 15, 2012	Avanti 0.6.5 Freeware
January 15, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.3.9 Freeware
January 15, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.3.9 Freeware
January 15, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.1.7 Freeware
January 15, 2012	SMPlayer 0.6.10.3691 unstable Freeware
January 15, 2012	MP4Cam2AVI 2.98 Freeware
January 15, 2012	LameXP 4.04 Alpha 16 Freeware
January 15, 2012	streamCapture 0.2.3 Freeware
January 14, 2012	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.1.4 Freeware
January 14, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.1.2
January 14, 2012	ProgDVB 6.82 Freeware
January 14, 2012	Subtitle Edit 3.2.3 Freeware
January 14, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.31490 Beta Freeware
January 13, 2012	Collectorz.com Movie Collector For Mac OS X 8.0 build 6
January 13, 2012	DV Scheduler 5.61 Freeware
January 13, 2012	Video Thumbnails Maker 4.0.0.2 Freeware
January 13, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.3965 Beta Freeware
January 13, 2012	rebox.NET 1.9.0.0 Freeware
January 12, 2012	SolveigMM AVI Trimmer + MKV 2.0.1201 Freeware
January 12, 2012	AutoFrequency 1.4.1.441 Freeware
January 11, 2012	EMDB 1.38 Freeware
January 11, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.3958 Freeware
January 11, 2012	ArcSoft MediaConverter 7.5.0.108
January 11, 2012	ArcSoft ShowBiz 5.0.1.375
January 11, 2012	DVDRemaster Pro 7.2
January 11, 2012	DVDRemaster Standard 7.2
January 11, 2012	VidCoder 1.2.6 Freeware
January 11, 2012	MKVExtractGUI-2 2.2.2.9 Freeware
January 11, 2012	MediaCoder 2011 R10 5222 Freeware
January 10, 2012	PlayOn 3.4.33.2735
January 10, 2012	GOM Media Player 2.1.37.5085 Freeware
January 10, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4238 (generic) Freeware
January 9, 2012	kmttg v0p8o Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 286

22 January, 2012

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

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to this Chinese New Year('s eve) edition of the Weekly News Roundup – the CNY(e) ed. of WNR, if you will. The alphabet soup continues, with more news on SOPA, PIPA, and a big one about MU, so with little time left in the year of the Rabbit, let's get started.

In another week in which the copyright related headlines dominated the news, we start with reaction to last week's White House statement on SOPA. The reaction from none other than media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

The controversial media owner wasn't afraid to be controversial when it came to talking about the SOPA/PIPA controversy, accusing Obama of being beholden to his "Silicon Valley paymasters", and calling Google a "piracy leader". But for many, the fact that Murdoch is supporting SOPA/PIPA, is probably enough to push them to the other side of the debate.

Which is probably why so many joined in on the January 18th day of action, which saw websites, including this one, black out their content to protest the votes on the controversial bills scheduled for 24 January. Even the newly obtained Righthaven.com, obtained via court appoint receiver auction last week, joined in the fun with a hilariously redacted letter to the MPAA (still not quite sure what the squid is all about). While thousands of websites joined in, the website that had the most influence on proceedings was probably Wikipedia. The website took the unprecedented step of blacking out all of their English language pages for 24 hours. When it was all over, and with everyone realising just how important Wikipedia has become in their lives, many also found out just exactly what SOPA was and what it could do. Some have criticized Wikipedia for participating in online activism, when the online encyclopaedia is supposed to be position neutral. This may be true, but when the very environment under which Wikipedia exists, and its own existence comes under threat, then there may be a need for a bit of activism. With people flooding elected official's websites, emails, phone lines, calling on them to not support SOPA/PIPA, the power of the Internet was on full show.

And the protest seems to have had an almost instant effect, with key supporters of both SOPA and PIPA pulling out, and it became apparent pretty aoon that both bills were, in effect, dead in the water. With the 24 January deadline coming ever closer, the two sponsors of the bills, Rep Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and the senior senator for Vermont, Patrick Leahy, decided to postpone both bills, indefinitely. It was a political necessity, as they would say, for now at least. Chances are, the same bills with only minor changes, and very likely with different names, will be reintroduced at some later point when the heat dies down, but for now, this was still a major political victory for the Internet. The tech sector, who have largely stayed out of the political arena, may have also realised the power of lobbying – whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, that remains to be seen. It's an unfortunate reality in today's political environment that political lobbying is so effective, but for too long, politicians have only been hearing one side of the story, and perhaps this will help even things up a bit.

Of course, the MPAA was fairly incensed at both the blackout, and the fact that their bill, and I'm using "their" correctly and intentionally, was sunk. Chris Dodd, who has had a difficult learning period as the new Chairman of the MPAA, came out attacking the blackout as a "dangerous gimmick … designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals", obvious inferring that politicians against SOPA/PIPA are negligent in their duties in stopping criminals, and playing to the xenophobic crowd, added the quantifier "foreign" just in case. Dodd also attacked the decision to pull the bills, again using all the right keywords, describing the entire Internet as a "safe haven for foreign thieves". And showing his experience as a Washington player, Dodd warned his former colleagues not to "ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk", demonstrating in one sentence the undue influence of money in US politics, and the entertainment lobby's masterful manipulation of democracy through it.

But before the champagne bottles had emptied, an even bigger story broke, as it was revealed that Megaupload, one of the web's largest properties, had been shut down. In a simultaneous, multi-national, law enforcement action, involving FBI agents in the US, and law enforcement in the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand, servers were seized, offices raided, an the founder of Megaupload and some of his employees were also arrested. In the court documents filed so far, incriminating emails (that were obtained, somehow) showed that the people running Megaupload were well aware of the nature of their service, in that it was being used by pirates, and sought to continue to profit from the activities. But then, only an idiot, or maybe a DC politician, won't have known what Megaupload was all about just by searching for a few MU links on Google.

I've not had a look at all the emails, only some of the more serious ones being posted here and there, but to me, this whole MU case strikes me as a civil matter, not a criminal one. For example, what makes MU different enough to the ongoing MPAA vs Hotfile trial – if anything, Hotfile appears to be even more "guilty", as they were paying pirates directly based on the popularity of their uploads. And as for incriminating emails, we've seen it all before in the Viacom vs YouTube case – despite the existence of these so called "smoking gun" evidence, as Viacom liked to call them, Google/YouTube eventually won the case on DMCA Safe Harbor grounds. So for those that are saying the government's case against MU is rock solid, I think it might be a bit too early to judge, as the legal documents revealed at this stage only shows one side of the story, the government's side. When MU provides their version of events, things might no longer be as black and white, and their lawyers might just cloud the issue enough to make the most serious criminal charges (like the racketeering and money laundering charges) go away.

And their version of events might just include testimony from the many that used MU's service legitimately, and most are pretty angry at the excessive amount of force and haste the government seems to have used in taking down MU. You cannot deny that MU had substantial non-infringing uses, and that could provide MU protection under the Betamax verdict, but it all depends if the infringing aspects are enough to negate MU's legitimate uses, and how complicit the owners and operators of MU were.

I also think part of the strategy here is to scare the rest of the online storage industry into taking copyright enforcement more seriously, even if the government doesn't ultimately win the case against MU. With SOPA/PIPA on hold for now, online storage services will need to take a good look at the DMCA, and make sure their compliance is genuine. That should be enough to keep the FBI away, for now, while most likely, tons of pirated content would still exist on these sites.

So a lot happening, and perhaps too much to digest in such a short period, but I'm sure both SOPA/PIPA, and MU, will be occupying the headlines for a while yet.

And on that note, we come to the end of this rather short WNR. Nothing left to say except, Xin Nian Kuai Le, Gong Xi Fa Cai (Happy New Year , Congratulations and be prosperous).

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

January 22, 2012	rebox.NET 1.9.2.0 Freeware
January 22, 2012	Miro 4.0.5 Freeware
January 22, 2012	VideoCacheView 2.10 Freeware
January 21, 2012	XBMC media center Eden 11.0 Beta 2 Freeware
January 21, 2012	TEncoder 1.6 Freeware
January 21, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.1.4
January 21, 2012	All My Movies 6.8 build 1320
January 21, 2012	ProgDVB 6.82.1 Freeware
January 20, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.3983 Beta Freeware
January 20, 2012	GoldWave 5.66
January 20, 2012	Visual AVCHD Time Stamp 2.0.2
January 20, 2012	DAEMON Tools 4.45.2 Freeware
January 20, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.31590 Beta Freeware
January 20, 2012	SMPlayer 0.6.10.3734 unstable Freeware
January 20, 2012	VIDEOzilla 3.3
January 20, 2012	XMedia Recode 3.0.7.0 Freeware
January 20, 2012	SolveigMM Video Splitter 3.0.1201.19
January 20, 2012	x264 VFW Codec Build 2146 Freeware
January 20, 2012	x264 r2146 Freeware
January 20, 2012	AutoFrequency 1.4.1.443 Freeware
January 19, 2012	Ut Video Codec Suite 10.2.4 Freeware
January 19, 2012	EMDB 1.40 Freeware
January 19, 2012	Cole2k Media - Codec Pack 7.9.6 Freeware
January 19, 2012	J. River Media Center 17.0.68 Beta
January 19, 2012	Vegas Pro 11 Build 521
January 19, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.4.0 Freeware
January 19, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.4.0 Freeware
January 19, 2012	BluffTitler 8.3.1.4
January 18, 2012	Any Video Converter Free 3.3.3 Freeware
January 18, 2012	XviD4PSP 6.0.4.8296 Freeware
January 18, 2012	Photodex ProShow Producer 5.0
January 18, 2012	Photodex ProShow Gold 5.0
January 18, 2012	NextPVR 2.3.6 Freeware
January 17, 2012	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.11.1
January 17, 2012	Mp3tag 2.49b Freeware
January 17, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.3971 Freeware
January 17, 2012	PlayClaw 3.0
January 16, 2012	MeGUI 2098 dev build Freeware
January 16, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4257 (generic/x64) Freeware
January 16, 2012	DVDStyler 2.2 beta 2 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 287

29 January, 2012

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

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. I hope you've had a good week, that the FBI hasn't stormed your home, seized your prized car collection and that you haven't had bail denied by a judge. Me? I've somehow talked myself into getting a (admittedly cheap) copy of Skyrim (on the PC, of course), despite knowing that I really don't have the time to play a game that has managed to destroy millions of hours of productivity since it was released. But curious as to what the hype was all about, I  talked myself into playing "just a few minutes". 20 hours of Skyrim later …

Quite a bit to get through, and with the steel ingots and leather strips not making themselves into armor and requiring my urgent attention, let's get started!

The fallout from the Mega story last week continues, as file hosting websites scramble this week to "clean up" their services, or simply to shut up shop.

This is probably what federal prosecutors, and the content holders urging them to take action, had been hoping for. With thousands of illegal download links now put out of commission, some permanently, it does seem like a major victory in the war against web piracy. Although whether this actually leads to any revenue increases, the whole point behind stopping piracy, time will tell.

For the music industry, this is the second major breakthrough against web piracy in just over a year, along with October 2010's closure of LimeWire. But it appears that despite what the NPD calculated to be a 46% decline in the number of downloaders shortly after the LimeWire closure, and with less songs downloaded per individual when comparing to the same period a year ago, music revenue for 2011 hasn't actually increased much at all. In fact, it remains 3% down compared to 2010, when LimeWire (up until October at least) was fully operational. The rate of decline has slowed, but you would think that with such a dramatic decline in piracy rates (nearly half of the people downloading pirated music were using LimeWire to do it just before it was closed down), and the RIAA's warning of billions upon billions of damage caused by piracy, that it would have at least helped the industry get back into growth. So it will be interesting to see, now that piracy through file hosting services has decreased, what effect it actually has on revenue.

This is of course assuming the main aim behind the targeting of Megaupload was in fact to do with piracy, as it was noted this week that Megaupload was already making plans to take on the music industry head on, in plans that could cause the major labels more damage than piracy ever could. The plan involves a new website called Megabox, which allowed unsigned artists to completely bypass music publishers, and market directly to music fans, with 90% of the revenue going back towards the artist. Even free (ie. pirated) downloads would generate money for the artists, as Megaupload promised to share the very income, earned from downloads, that got them into trouble last week. And if Megabox works, then it would have been a big blow to the majors, and would have seriously questioned their relevance in the age of the Internet, when "naturally" generated hype is more valuable than any kind of promotion that labels could come up with. And with technology enabling artists to sell directly, without having to invest a lot in infrastructure (or they can leave it to tech companies to handle that side of things), artists no longer have to see a majority share of their revenue going to record labels. If there's one thing the labels fear more than web piracy, it's this, and while it might require one to be wearing a "tin-foil-hat" to think that this was the only reason behind the Mega take-down, it's probably a nice little bonus the record industry got out of the whole thing. But while the likes of the RIAA can stop Megabox, they can't stop innovation and progress, not forever, and a major shift in the way content is packaged, sold and distributed is on its way, if it isn't here already.

While the Mega stories were very much dominating the headlines, the temporary demise of SOPA was still on people's minds. One of those minds was EMI's VP of Urban Promotions, Craig Davis. In a Q&A session with the Reddit horde, Davis expressed largely personal views that seemed to differ quite a bit from the general line of thinking coming out of the music industry these days, in that legislation is the only way forward to deal with the web piracy problem. Perhaps highlighting the internal divisions within the music industry on how to handle the web piracy problem (something we don't usually get to see, with the RIAA's loudspeakers drowning out all other opinions), Davis personally opposes SOPA, and says that piracy is more of a service issue, than a pricing one, mirroring what Valve's Gabe Newell said a few months ago. In fact, Davis specifically mentions Newell as having the right idea when it comes to fighting web piracy. By focusing too much on the pricing issues behind piracy, major content holders often come to the conclusion that there is no real way to "compete" with pirated downloads, as they could not offer their content for free (although I would argue that piracy itself carries a cost, in terms of legal risk, technical and safety issues, and a moral cost, and so for legal content to compete, it does not have to be free, it only needs to be seen as good value). But by concentrating on service, innovation, basically by making legal options more attractive in more ways than just on price, then "legit" could compete with "free". And perhaps Newell's Steam could offer guidance to the music, and movie industries as to how to best leverage the positive aspects of the Internet, and how to compete with piracy – Steam's legendary sales, it's active community of gamers, and value added features, all help it not only compete effectively with pirated downloads, but also traditional retailers.

But innovation always carries a risk, a risk that, historically, the music and movie industries havn't been willing to accept. Whenever something new hits the block, whether it's home audio taping, or VCRs, these industries have resisted change and has tried to sue their way out of the problem. Eventually though, they did accept that change was inevitable, embraced innovation, and has come out better for it. But what's different this time though is the incredible power lobbyists now hold over elected officials and the systemic corruption in D.C., and this now offers entrenched major content holders another "solution" – to legislate their way out of trouble. Most in D.C. have  gotten so used to using money to buy policies, that they no longer sees anything wrong with it. Which is probably why former US Senator, and current MPAA head, Chris Dodd was so transparent in his attack against political opponents of SOPA, literally threatening to stop writing checks for them come election time. That he simply didn't see any problem with the head of a lobby group threatening to stop paying politicians if a favourable law wasn't passed, shows just how "comfortable" the Washington crowd has gotten with the way things are done over there (or it may just be because Dodd is stupid). But while Dodd may not have felt that there was anything wrong with his statement, others did, and using the same tactic that has already worked against SOPA, people are signing a new petition on the White House's "We the People" petition website to ask for a full investigation of Dodd for bribery. With 25,000 signatures required within 30 days for the White House to officially issue a statement on the petition, 30,000 signatures were promptly recorded in just a week (that's the Internet for ya). The fact that the White House will now have to issue on statement of Dodd's alleged improprieties, regardless of what the statement actually says, should be hugely embarrassing for the MPAA Chairman. Or it could be much much more serious.

With so many big issues being discussed, trust Ubisoft to still somehow steal the headlines via yet another incident with one of their controversial DRM choices. When review site Guru3D went about using Ubi's Anno 2070 in a hardware benchmark test, they found that the 3 PC activation limit also applied when the GPU was changed, and so having barely started their test, they had used up all of their activations. Having calculated that they would need 7 copies, or 21 activations, to finish their testing, Guru3D contacted Ubisoft about this potential "bug" with their DRM, but Guru3D were promptly told that not only was this normal and intentional, Ubisoft wouldn't be providing the 7 copies needed to finish their testing. So Guru3D did what any self respecting website would have done – they published the entire detail of their ordeal for the Net public to judge, and the expected public backlash eventually forced Ubisoft to back down and allow for GPU changes. Ubisoft came out with the usual statement saying that very few people were affected by this particular problem with their DRM, which is probably true considering the game only came out in November, and I don't think many would have changed their GPUs twice during this period. But the problem with DRM is that it's forever, so were Ubisoft really expecting PC gamers, of all people, to not frequently change their GPU or other parts of their hardware? Or maybe they just didn't think their games were that good for people to be still playing it for more than a couple of month. For now though, while GPU changes are exempt from requiring new activations, other hardware are still being included, and so don't be surprised if this problem pops up again at a later date.

And on that note, we move to gaming. For some reason, all the Xbox 720 rumours decided to out themselves this week.

Of course, there cannot be an Xbox rumour without mentioning Blu-ray, and the next Xbox (which I hope will be more imaginatively named than "Xbox 720?) will apparently have a Blu-ray drive. Whether it plays Blu-ray movies or not, remains to be seen though, since the Wii U will have a "Blu-ray like" drive, that won't play movies.

On the GPU front, a Radeon 6000 series chip might be used. This actually feels too "new" of a chip for a console that's supposed to be released next year, since the Wii U is only using a Radeon 4000 series. The reason why console manufacturers use older chips, other than the maturity of the product line, is due to the time it takes to engineer an existing off the shelve solution for a game console, the cost involved in using the state-of-the-art GPU, and the fact that optimizations mean console GPUs don't need to be as powerful as their PC counterparts.

The most controversial rumour involves Kotaku's reveal that the next Xbox could ban the playing of second hand games. Publishers have long complained that second hand games are cannibalising sales, as gamers can "share" the same copy and game stores profit from each transaction – only one payment from these transactions is made to publishers, right at the start. Publishers have come up with various ways to solve this problem, for example, a voucher system (but that don't really works for limiting the multiplayer component of games). So if Microsoft really wanted to please publishers, and get them to release more exclusives for the platform, then having a system that ensures second hand games won't work will do the job. Although I think this will backfire and hurt sales, and the platform, in the long run.

Nothing much more happening this week, at least no in the real non-Skyrim world, so we come to the end of another WNR. See you next week.

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

January 29, 2012	SMPlayer 0.6.10.3795 unstable Freeware
January 29, 2012	XviD4PSP 6.0.4.8839 Freeware
January 29, 2012	Vista Codec Package 6.2.1 Freeware
January 29, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.4.2 Freeware
January 29, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.4.2 Freeware
January 29, 2012	BDtoAVCHD 1.7.1 Freeware
January 29, 2012	PS3 Media Server 1.50.1 Freeware
January 29, 2012	MKV Chapterizer 2.2 Freeware
January 29, 2012	LAV Filters 0.45 Freeware
January 29, 2012	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.4.9 Freeware
January 29, 2012	MeGUI 2106 dev build Freeware
January 29, 2012	kmttg v0p8p Freeware
January 28, 2012	SolveigMM Video Splitter 3.0.1201.27
January 28, 2012	LAME MP3 Encoder 3.99.4 Freeware
January 28, 2012	MLC Lossless Codec 1.1 Freeware
January 28, 2012	XMedia Recode 3.0.7.6 Freeware
January 28, 2012	FFmpeg 0.10 Freeware
January 28, 2012	Cinema Craft Encoder SP3 1.3.0.3
January 27, 2012	VDownloader 3.8.983
January 27, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.1.6
January 27, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.5.3.4006 Beta Freeware
January 27, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.4006 Freeware
January 27, 2012	LameXP 4.04 Alpha 17 Freeware
January 26, 2012	VideoSpec 0.9.4 Freeware
January 26, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 5.7.0 Freeware
January 26, 2012	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 8.2.0 Freeware
January 26, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.2.0 Freeware
January 26, 2012	BurnAware Free Edition 4.5 Freeware
January 26, 2012	H264 Level Editor 1.2.0 Freeware
January 25, 2012	MediaInfo 0.7.53 Freeware
January 25, 2012	ccextractor 0.60 Freeware
January 24, 2012	PlayOn 3.4.34.2783
January 24, 2012	VIDEOzilla 3.4
January 24, 2012	MythTV 0.24.2 Freeware
January 23, 2012	GraphStudio 0.4.9.0 (GraphStudioNext) Freeware
January 23, 2012	StreamRecorder.NET 1.0.6 Freeware
January 23, 2012	SubExtractor 1.0.2.5 Freeware
January 23, 2012	Web Stream Recorder 2012
January 23, 2012	Bolide Slideshow Creator 1.1 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 288

5 February, 2012

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

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another edition of the Weekly News Roundup. So nearly 7 days and 25 more hours of Skyrim later, I have come to one conclusion: Skyrim is horribly, terribly, addictive! Which is just as well, as it hasn't exactly been a busy news week (it's funny how the slow news weeks always coincides with weeks in which I've been pre-occupied with other stuff).

We start with some disappointing news. Last week, a petition was set up on the White House's own petition website asking for MPAA's chairman, Chris Dodd, to be investigated for bribery after the former Senator's controversial statements (Dodd has threatened to stop writing cheques for politicians who dared to oppose SOPA, live on Fox News).

With the petition getting the required number of signatures to warrant a White House response, in only a week, everyone was waiting to see what the response would be. Unfortunately, the White House's early response was not what everyone was hoping for. The White House's only response was a refusal to comment because the petition  "requests a specific law enforcement action", and the site's policy wouldn't allow that. So unless someone can reword the petition as to not request a specific law enforcement action, but merely to seek comments on whether it is acceptable for the head of an influential lobby group to be making these kinds of statements, the White House, and Dodd, looks to be spared of public embarrassment on a technicality.

With most of focus these past few months on the appropriateness, or inappropriateness, of the legal solutions to the web piracy problem, perhaps one key point has been forgotten: has piracy actually hurt the industries that are spending millions to lobby for the new laws? Even some of the key anti-SOPA campaigners often stress the need to take action against the web piracy problem (just not agreeing with SOPA/PIPA), but if you look at the creative landscape today, and the business opportunities all around, are things really that bad?

And this is exactly what a new report (or infographic for those that don't want to read), titled The Sky is Rising, is looking into – the actual impact that a decade of web piracy has had on the creative industries – books, video games, movies and of course, music. And the results may be surprising, at least to those calling for tougher action on the web piracy "problem" with the aim of protecting the "incentives" for creativity. But far from the doom and gloom that the lobbyist have been telling politicians, it seems this has been a decade *for* creativity. More books are being produced than ever (not a surprising conclusion, thanks to online services that now allow anyone to sell their books), and thanks to services like iTunes and Netflix, the average consumer can get access to more movies, TV shows and music than ever possible. Even the video game boom of the 2000's has somehow managed surpassed the great video game boom of the 80's and 90's, if not in quality of games (Skyrim and a few others excepted), than at least in quantity and revenue. Smartphones have revolutionized the way software is sold through small, cheap apps that almost any developer can publish and profit from (yours truly included) , and thanks to the Humble and other bundles (and Steam), the indie game industry have never had it better. And then there's YouTube, and the hours upon hours of original videos that are uploaded every second to the site. Of course, a lot of the benefits from this particular boom time has not benefited the traditional gatekeepers of content, your major movie studios and music labels. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. To say that what's bad for your Universal's would be equally bad for the artists that continue to create, would be at the very least simplifying the issue at hand, if not an outright lie.

Now, I wouldn't go as far as saying that web piracy has enabled all of this. In my opinion, web piracy provides benefits to creativity, by allowing content to be consumed by more people than ever, but it does have a negative financial impact too. But to cripple the Internet and to use drastic measures to attempt (but ultimately fail) to solve the web piracy problem, may end up hurting creativity, and providing little if any financial gains. Internet based platforms that empower individuals to publish original content may very well be the ones hurt most by draconian copyright laws, and so solutions that herald themselves as saviours of creativity, may become its worst enemy. The strange thing is that if this happens, if creativity on the Internet is killed off by the likes of SOPA and PIPA, it's the traditional gatekeepers that may be the beneficiaries, despite not having actually stopped the web piracy problem. And maybe this is what they were hoping for all along.

It's always worth remembering that the main principle behind copyright is not to protect profits, and certainly not the profits of license holders and gatekeepers who are usually not the creators of content. Copyright has always been about protecting innovation, the public's need to be able to participate in cultural and informational exchange, and the encouragement of creativity. And the Internet, even including the unsavoury elements, have largely helped this cause, even if the likes of Sony and EMI have not been the primary beneficiaries of these changing times.

And so this brings us to two stories that somehow bring together the odd pairing of Neil Young and Angry Birds, but both carrying the same message, that maybe the positive effects of piracy can outweigh the negative effects. Neil Young spoke at the D: Dive into Media conference about the effects of web music piracy, and it appears the the music legend is not at all concerned (and more worried about the poor quality of said illegal downloads, than anything else). Young theorizes that web piracy is basically the new radio, a new way for music lovers to listen to new songs for free, and a great way for musicians to promote their new music. There are parallels in history that supports Young's theory, in that the music industry was very much up in arms against radio when it was first introduced, just like they were up in arms about people making mixtapes when cassette tapes was first available. The technology may be new, but the music industry's response isn't.

Before web piracy, the choice for someone may have been to consume (listen, play, read, watch …), or to not consume – based on what they can afford, and what they think they like. Promotional activities back then were all about getting people to choose to consume, and these promotions usually involved a huge financial cost to buy air time, ads, generate hype and the like.

In the Internet era, and thanks to piracy, consumers now longer have to make this sacrifice – they can get it for free, if they can't afford it, and if they hear bad reviews about something, they can still check it out without the need to be an idiot and pay for it. And promotions and hype are generated organically as a result, for good stuff, or stuff so bad that it becomes good.

But my point would be that as long as people are still spending money and spending more every year (and by all accounts, courtesy of The Sky Is Rising report, this has been the trend), then does it really matter how much they're getting for free? Or rather, it does matter, because this is perhaps when piracy actually becomes a discovery tool, helping people to discover things they never thought they would like, and eventually encouraging them to spend money on things they never thought they would.

And if publishers really want to get pragmatic about web piracy, then it should all be about weighing the positives against the negatives, the potential loss of short term revenue, versus the potential discoveries made by people that probably never intended to buy – in other words, does it help to build the brand? And according to the developers of Angry Birds, Rovio, this is exactly why piracy may be helpful. Rovio's chief executive Mikael Hed makes a great point about differentiating between "customer" and "fan". A fan may not have been a customer (thanks to piracy), but it does not mean they won't be a customer in the future. And similarly, just because someone buys something and become a customer, it doesn't mean they will continue to be one if you put out inferior product after inferior product, all glued together by a botched DRM, for example. And Hed concludes that by growing the fanbase, even if some of it is done via piracy, will help to grow the business. Lose those fans, through ridiculous pricing, DRM, attempts to coerce legislators into passing new draconian laws, and see you business crumble.

Hed does mention that Rovio learnt a lot from the music industry about what *not* to do in regards to piracy, but I think maybe there's another company that's more closely related to what Rovio does, that they can also "learn" from. Ubisoft will next week put on a public demonstration of just why their DRM sucks and sucks so hard, as the company's planned move of web services from a third party provider, to their own infrastructure, will mean a lot of their games, including single player ones, won't be available during the transition. Almost all of their online based games will be affected, and half a dozen games, including Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. 2, will be totally unplayable, online or offline, thanks to the DRM requirements.

So not only were Ubisoft short-sighted to not see the need, from the get go, to have their own web service infrastructure despite the overuse of web based DRM, they apparently does not possess the technical knowhow to offer a smooth, disruption free, transition either. If this is what a planned outage is like, I would hate to see the kind of damage an unplanned outage can do – even Amazon took a week to completely fix their cloud services outage last year, and they actually knew what they were doing. As expected, people with pirated versions won't be affected at all – has there been a game company that has done more to promote piracy than Ubisoft? The Pirate Bay should give them an award or something ...

Unfortunately, talking about games has only made me think of Skyrim, and I'm afraid I will need my fix again pretty soon. So on that note, see you next week.

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February 5, 2012	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 1.4.4
February 5, 2012	Aegisub 2.1.9 Freeware
February 5, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.4.4 Freeware
February 5, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.4.4 Freeware
February 4, 2012	MeGUI 2106 Freeware
February 4, 2012	Codec Tweak Tool 5.1.4 Freeware
February 4, 2012	ProgDVB 6.83 Freeware
February 4, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.31908 Beta Freeware
February 3, 2012	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.1.10 Freeware
February 3, 2012	VDownloader 3.8.985
February 3, 2012	All My Movies 6.8 build 1321
February 3, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.2.6 Freeware
February 2, 2012	BurnAware Free Edition 4.5 Update Freeware
February 2, 2012	MCEBuddy 2.0 Beta 20 Freeware
February 2, 2012	Miro 4.0.6 Freeware
February 2, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4293 (x64) Freeware
February 1, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.6.1.4026 Beta Freeware
February 1, 2012	AsfBin 1.8.3.934 Freeware
February 1, 2012	cdrtfe 1.4.1 Freeware
February 1, 2012	Sublight 3.1.0 Freeware
February 1, 2012	Serviio 0.6.2 Freeware
February 1, 2012	BD Rebuilder 0.40.02 Beta Freeware
January 31, 2012	PowerDVD Ultra 12
January 31, 2012	Cyberlink PowerDVD 12
January 31, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.1.7
January 30, 2012	OpenShot Video Editor 1.4.1 Freeware
January 30, 2012	SMPlayer 0.7.0 Freeware
January 29, 2012	Cole2k Media - Codec Pack 7.9.7 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 289

12 February, 2012

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

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Week 2 of my Skyrim adventure sees me fighting a dragon, two wolves, two bandits, a conjurer and a bear, all at the same, inopportune, time. It also saw an incredibly laborious trek at walking speed (thanks to having to carry too much dragon bones and scales), from the site of my latest dragon slaying, to my horse, which was "parked" quite a distance away at the nearest watchtower. Yes, I could have dropped a few items and fast travelled back home, but I'm a level 46 hoarder in the game, so I must loot everything (and I mean everything, as my prized collection of forks and plates will attest to).

Wait, what? WNR? Oh yes, that. Um, yeah I guess I better get started, not that we have much to go through since, well, as you can see I had a lot of other things to do during the week.

Following up on last week's story about Ubisoft's DRM foolishness – apparently, the server migration didn't go as smoothly as Ubisoft had hoped.

Gamers soon reported that games that were supposed to be unaffected by the server outage, like Driver: San Francisco and Anno 2070, were somehow being affected as well.

It seems to be me that game publishers are happy to burden paying gamers with ridiculous levels of DRM, forcing them to jump through hoops just to play the games they've already paid for, but aren't willing to step up the plate to make any sort of guarantees in regards to the uptime of authentication servers. I think publishers may find that paying for authentication servers with 99.99% uptime, an industry norm, and having to keep them running for the life cycle of the game (say 8 years), might actually cost a lot more than not having DRM, considering the actual DRM may require a licensing fee as well if it isn't developed in-house. And since the DRM doesn't stop piracy anyway, I do wonder how these companies even justify the expenditure to their shareholders.

And the problem with online based DRM is that you're really at the mercy of those who control the DRM servers. When the publisher decides that it's no longer in their financial interest to keep the DRM servers running, then your games will simply stop working. And if you try to remove the DRM yourself, you could fall foul of the DMCA.

Now, I love Steam, and I free admit I have purchased way too many games from them in the various sales. But the greatness of the Steam platform sometimes makes me forget that, in the end, it really is just another form of online DRM. Sure, they do have an offline mode, and Steam makes the authentication part mostly invisible, and then makes up for it by giving gamers more value-added features. But it also means a catastrophic loss if you're unable to access your Steam account, if it was stolen by a hacker for example, or having it banned by Steam. And this is exactly what happened to Russian gamer gimperial, who had his Steam account banned for no apparent reason, and only managed to get it re-instated after the story of his plight made headlines. The thing is, had gimperial purchased his games the old fashioned way, on DVDs from retail stores (and those games didn't use Steam), it's unlikely that just a single ban of an online account would result in all of his games being unplayable.

There are several things Steam could do to alleviate the potential suffering of gamers. They should start by investing some of their vast amounts of revenue into having a telephone support line, as it's much better to deal with a real person in real-time to resolve problems such as an unwarranted account banning, then via email. They should also outline clearly which specific offences can lead to an account banning, and when accounts are banned, the user should be notified of the reasons (so at the very least, they know not to make the same mistake the next time). And then top it up by having a transparent appeals process. And it's not just Steam, but all online services should really have something like this (I'm looking at you Google), because losing any of your online accounts these days can be a traumatic event that creates extreme difficulties for your professional, and personal, lives.

While the hoopla over SOPA/PIPA is dying down, our friends in Europe (and elsewhere) have not been resting on their laurels, and protests continue as I type, in Poland, the Czech Republic, France, England, Croatia, and many other places, against the controversial ACTA copyright treaty. Thousands of people are protesting what they're calling an unprecedented level of surveillance the treaty will encourage member countries to adopt, something many haven't seen since the days of the communist bloc. But instead of being watched by Big Brother for the benefit of the ruling party, it's now surveillance to help (largely) American corporations, which is a little bit better I suppose, but also a little bit worse (for example, it's impossible to overthrow a foreign corporation). And just like with SOPA/PIPA, victory is possible, now that Germany has already distanced itself from signing the treaty. The message seems to be clear – "It's not acceptable to sacrifice the rights of freedom for copyrights," words spoken by Thomas Pfeiffer of the German Greens party.

The fact that Hollywood, one of the key backers behind ACTA, seems to be targeting Europe shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Hollywood will claim the focus is due to the fact that piracy rates in Europe are much higher than say in the United States (after all, it is home to The Pirate Bay). But a new study seems to suggest that it may very well be Hollywood's own fault for the higher than normal piracy rates in Europe, and it's all down to something called a "release window" (or really just a fancy way of saying "delayed releases"). The reasons for the delays varies. Sometimes it's due to short term greed, the delay in negotiating better distribution deals (if the movie or TV show becomes a big hit in the US, then studios are in a much better position to negotiate if they wait), and having multiple release windows (eg. one for Blu-ray/DVD, one for subscription TV, one for free-to-air TV) allows studios to have tiered licensing rates. Sometimes it's also due to localization issues, subtitles and dubs and the like. But it's mostly, entirely avoidable. The new study found that the longer the release window, the higher the financial loses that the industry has largely blamed on pre-release piracy.

More importantly, pre-release piracy seems to have little effect in the US, suggesting that people are not choosing pre-release pirated versions (usually poor quality) over the cinematic experience, which makes sense if you think about it. And it also suggests there's less urgency in the US to be able to watch a movie before it is officially released, whereas the urgency seems to be much more, um, urgent in international markets, especially if the movie has already been released in the US.

And I think the Internet is largely to blame for this urgency. The good old watercooler discussion has now moved online, and it's now global, so the need to be able to join in online conversation about the latest movie, or the latest episode of a hit TV show, or even the latest game (Skyrim!), means people need the content, and they needed it yesterday. If they can't get it legally, in the time-frame they want or at the price they can afford, then they'll seek alternatives. And it just happens that piracy is the most available alternative there is. I believe there's a huge, untapped market that can be exploited if content creators removed the artificial barriers for international releases, and by providing localization as quickly as possible. Or basically what Valve's Gabe Newell said a couple of months ago, with proof of the success of this strategy in the fact that the notorious piracy market that is Russia is now Steam's second largest market in Europe. Content creators should strive to make content available cheaply and quickly, before they go trampling on people's basic rights to enact laws that will do very little to combat piracy in the long term.

There also exists the potential to monetize piracy, and while the industry might want to hold the moral high ground, at some point, they have to accept that piracy, no matter what you do, will always exist. And you might as well make money off it. As usual, Apple are pioneering the way forward, at least with the music industry, via iTunes Match. The service aims to "convert" pirated downloads into legitimate copies, all for the small price of $25 per year. And with license holders getting a share of the cash, they're largely happy to get something that they wouldn't have got before.

And I also think there exists a third potential revenue source – getting people to pay for thing they didn't think they wanted, by presenting something that appears to be really good value. Steam makes this work via sales and relying on stupid people like me to buy crap games, yes even games like Duke Nukem Forever, just because it's cheap. But not all cheap games are crap, and some have even become my favourites, leading me to buy sequels (albeit also at discounted prices). Steam, and the publishers that take part in sales, know that cheap games have promotional value, especially if a sequel is just around the corner, and so cheap games becomes a sort of discovery incentive. Piracy also enables discovery, with the incentive being that it's all free.

What's my point? Well, after getting a Kindle Fire and getting hooked on the free content that the free one month trial of Amazon Prime offered (with 15,000 movies, documentaries and TV shows on offer, unlimited free steaming for Prime subscribers), I recently signed up to a year's membership for $79. Most of the content on there I wouldn't consider buying, nor would I consider piracy (although some probably would) – but having had access to it for a month, I determined that $79 per year is good value for what I'm getting. That's $79 content holders would never have gotten if they hadn't made the content available for "free" on Prime. And on a related note, the fact that people paid for premium Megaupload accounts so they could download more pirated content suggests that even pirates are willing to pay, as long as you present them with something that's is seen as having good value.

Speaking of Megaupload, with the file hosting industry still scrambling to ensure their own safety, it's interesting to note that RapidShare, a leader in the field, has been calm throughout. After all, why wouldn't they be, as they were removed from the RIAA/MPAA's "notorious markets" list last year having been on it the previous year. So what exactly is RapidShare doing right, that Megaupload and other websites have not done? Education and enforcement, seems to be key. Education means educating those in positions of power about what RapidShare's business model is all about (ie. not about piracy), and RS's lobbying activities in Washington won't have gone unnoticed. It also means actually ensuring their business model is not dependant on piracy, so no rewards program for major uploaders or referrers.

And possibly more important is the need to show content holders the site's copyright policies aren't just for show. RapidShare has a well staffed abuse department, that not only aims to deal with takedown requests in a timely manner, but also seeks out and removes infringing content pro-actively. Does RapidShare still host pirated content? Of course they do. But they have a business model based on legitimate usage, and they have a working anti-piracy policy, and that's all that's required really from a legal point of view – nowhere in any law, except for the failed SOPA/PIPA, does it say that a website has to ensure that it's 100% clean of pirated content, an impossible tasks these days due to the user generated nature of website content.

Gaming wise, the NPD figures for January are out, and they don't make good reading. In fact, it's so bad that analysts are even questioning the validity of the data. I haven't had time (I know, I know) to fully digest (I know, I know) all the figures yet, but I'll do that and write up the analysis as usual early next week.

Despite not wanting to write a lot, and not having much to write about, I've somehow gone over the 2000 word mark, so I think that's as good a time as any to stop writing. See you next week.

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February 12, 2012	DXVA Checker 2.7.0 Freeware
February 12, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.1.8
February 12, 2012	BD Rebuilder 0.40.05 Beta Freeware
February 12, 2012	Simple x264 Launcher 2012-02-12 Freeware
February 12, 2012	TEncoder 1.7.1 Freeware
February 11, 2012	CopyTo 5.1.0.0
February 11, 2012	IsoBuster 2.9 Beta
February 11, 2012	BurnAware Free Edition 4.6 Freeware
February 11, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.31983 Beta Freeware
February 10, 2012	MPEG-2 Transport Stream packet analyser 2.4.1.1 Freeware
February 10, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.4.7 Freeware
February 10, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.4.7 Freeware
February 10, 2012	MeGUI 2112 Freeware
February 10, 2012	Windows 7 Codec Pack 3.8.0 Freeware
February 10, 2012	XBMC media center Eden 11.0 Beta 3 Freeware
February 10, 2012	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.12.0
February 10, 2012	MKVToolnix 5.3.0 Freeware
February 9, 2012	SolveigMM Video Splitter 3.0.1202.8
February 9, 2012	x264 r2146 Freeware
February 9, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.3.4 Freeware
February 9, 2012	Bino 1.2.1 Freeware
February 9, 2012	PlayOn 3.4.35.2853
February 9, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.6.1.4048 Beta Freeware
February 9, 2012	Any Video Converter Free 3.3.4 Freeware
February 8, 2012	Video Thumbnails Maker 4.0.0.3 Freeware
February 8, 2012	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 8.3.2 Freeware
February 8, 2012	ProgDVB 6.83.1 Freeware
February 7, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 5.8.0 Freeware
February 7, 2012	J. River Media Center 17.0.82 Beta
February 7, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.4041 Freeware
February 7, 2012	Avanti 0.6.6 Freeware
February 7, 2012	OpenShot Video Editor 1.4.2 Freeware
February 6, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4305 (generic/x64) Freeware
February 6, 2012	streamCapture 0.2.6 Freeware
February 6, 2012	kmttg v0p8q Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 290

19 February, 2012

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to the latest edition of the WNR. It's a shame that the leap day doesn't fall on a Sunday this year, as it would make an awesome collector's edition of the WNR – as such, it's on possibly the most boring day of the week:  Wednesday.

I know I promised the NPD analysis last week, but it turns out there just wasn't enough data to compile one, thanks to both Nintendo and Sony keeping mum on hardware figures (no doubt because they have crap numbers). Only Microsoft released figures for its Xbox 360 console (the least worst of the bunch). So it seems January 2012's NPD analysis will have to be replaced with a much shortened version, which you'll find in the "Gaming" section below.

In terms of news, there were only a couple of interesting ones, and a few late breaking ones that I will cover briefly in this edition, but in more detail in the next. So don't be surprised at the brevity of this WNR (and it totally didn't have anything to do with the fact that I've now put in 50+ hours in Skyrim).

The likes of the MPAA and RIAA have compared web piracy to a lot of things, but I've always wondered why they haven't compared it to some kind of infectious disease, as I think The Piracy Pandemic^® has a certain ring to it.

It's a great comparison not just because the content holder set their hyperbole engine into overdrive by comparing web piracy to something deadly and scary, but also on two other major points. One, just like an infectious disease, piracy spreads quickly, and it does so in poorer countries with greater virulence. And also just like viruses, piracy adapts to any measures you employ to try and stop it, whether it's a technical measure, or a legal one. The more you try to fight it, the more likely it will mutate into something that's more resistant.

The latter of these two points was demonstrated, twice, this week. Decentralisation has been a continuing trend in piracy (Megaupload and sites of similar ilk are actually quite a throwback to the early days of piracy, where everything was hosted on centralised HTTP websites), but despite decentralisation being the major driving force behind the creation of BitTorrent, two major centralised components still hold it back from truly being decentralised. The inherent weakness in BitTorrent file sharing is the existence, and the necessity, for centralised trackers and a centralised "indexer" website that catalogues the available downloads, like The Pirate Bay. This website would also host .torrent files, and while these files are small by any standard, the sheer number of them ensures that the total size of the website and database can be quite large. Taking down a tracker can cause downloads to cease to work, as peers would not be able to find each other, and taking down websites like The Pirate Bay would mean that you won't even able able to find the torrents to get you started. These two weaknesses have often been exploited by content holders, with past lawsuits able to bring down popular trackers, and BitTorrent indexers such as Mininova.

This week, The Pirate Bay announced steps which will mitigate these two risks, although the actual technical measures used to solve these two problems have existed for some time already. The Pirate Bay, at the end of this month, will remove .torrent files for any torrents that has over 10 peers and will use Magnet Links instead. A Magnet Link is simply a web URL, a string of text that once loaded into your BitTorrent Client of choice, will give the client just enough information to be able to download the actual .torrent file from users that are already sharing the torrent. And using the DHT (Distributed Hash Table) technique, Magnet Links don't need trackers in order to download the .torrent files (and the actual download most likely won't need trackers as well, thanks also to DHT). But for The Pirate Bay, the best thing about switching to a Magnet Link based website is the fact that they no longer need to host .torrent files (well, not as many as before, anyway), and this allows the hosting, and bandwidth, requirements of The Pirate Bay to be reduced to the point where the entire website can probably fit onto a small USB thumb drive (removing all .torrent files, a user has already demonstrated the ability to reduce The Pirate Bay's Magnet Link database to only 90MB). This will help more TPB mirrors to be set up, and to allow the website to be moved from host to host more easily, thus making the website more resilient to take-downs. There's also something quite perverse about being able to "download" the entire Pirate Bay to your hard-drive.

And even in the event of The Pirate Bay finally being taken down, there's now a plan B. A new BitTorrent client, Tribler, aims to remove the any need for websites like The Pirate Bay, and remove the one last centralised component of the largely decentralised BitTorrent download process. Tribler does this by moving the torrent indexing component into the BitTorrent swarm itself, and allow you can search for torrents right within the client. Even things like reviews, comments, and the obligatory removal of fake torrents, can all be done within the client. Tribler, developed by researchers at Delft University, is also open source, and that makes it more resilient, as if one variant of the client is taken down by authorities, others will pop up almost instantly (and probably with more features). What this essentially means is that BitTorrent, via Tribler, is now unstoppable. Or to put it even more succinctly, and to quote the head of the Tribler project, "The only way to take it down is to take The Internet down."

Now, just because BitTorrent downloads cannot be stopped, it does not mean that you can't be forced to stop using BitTorrent, as the major flaw in Tribler is that it still allows authorities, and those seeking to profit from (anti) piracy, to track your IP address. So the next evolution of BitTorrent, in my mind, will be one that allows peers to communicate anonymously – that is, to allow sharing without making the IP addresses public at any point in the process. The external pressure heaped towards downloaders, from law firms such as US Copyright Group, and also the rights holder's push for graduated response, will no doubt have already pushed clever developers into tackling this very problem, and I don't expect we'll have to wait too long for this next evolution. And once it arrives, BitTorrent will be anonymous, unstoppable, and it will spell "game over" for both technical and legal methods to stop the downloading.

This scenario both scares me, and excites me. It scares me because, with no way to stop downloaders, things could get out of hand very quickly. But it also excites me because, without any technical or legal recourse, content holders might finally have admit to the need to compete with piracy, and we may finally see the entire industry put everything behind innovating their way out of the problem. Consumers will be the main beneficiary, and I look forward to new and brilliant ways to consume content, legally. Of course, this should have been the way forward since the first torrent was uploaded, and it would have been easier to compete back then, compared to a time when BitTorrent may have become truly unstoppable.

Going back to the point I made earlier about Megaupload being an outdated way of hosting pirated downloads, the closure of R&B/hip hop blog RnBXclusive this week shows why centralisation is dangerous. But what's more dangerous is the pattern that's emerging with law enforcement actions against websites suspected of copyright infringement – the fact that law enforcement agencies appear to be acting as the private police force for the entertainment industry without questioning the one-sided evidence presented to them – evidence that has often not stacked up in court. Time and time again, websites were taken down with the full force of the law, but still managed to be difficult to prosecute, or in the case of the similarly themed DaJaz1 (taken down by US Homeland Security as part of Operation In Our Sites), the case might not even end up in court. This is why due process exists and why it's needed, for the evidence to be tested in a court of law before guilt is determined, and action is taken.

And to add insult to injury, visitors to rnbxclusive.com were initially threatened with messages that mentioned "an unlimited fine" and "a maximum penalty of up to 10 years" in prison for anyone who simply downloaded some songs from the website. A Big Brother style warning of the "capability to monitor and investigate you" was given an extra dimension of fear, by displaying the visitor's IP address on the home page (a simple enough thing to do in php, but still scary enough for the less technical minded). These threats have since been removed from the website, no doubt due to complaints about the potentially misleading statements which could get SOCA (UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency), the organisation that took charge of seizing the website, into trouble. But it's the kind of hyperbole we're used to seeing from the entertainment industry, the most likely ghost writers behind the now removed messages.

One of the entertainment industry's tactic is to portray everyone who does something against their interest as criminals, even if it's something as simple as ripping your own legally purchased DVD. I reported a couple of months ago on the efforts by public interest group Public Knowledge to make DVD ripping legal. They argued that due to the increasing number of devices that don't play DVDs, such as tablets and smartphones, consumers need to be given the right to rip their own legally purchased movie discs. The fact that everyone who wants to do it is already doing it, means that making DVD ripping illegal under the DMCA is pointless at best, and at worse, criminalizes an activity that falls under fair use. With PK having made their submission to the US Copyright Office, which reviews submissions for exemptions to existing copyright laws every three years, the MPAA has just responded with quite an absurd argument *for* keeping DVD ripping illegal: it gives consumer more choice!

What the MPAA is saying is that since consumers don't have the legal option to rip their own DVDs, then the legal option to get the movie you already paid for, on other devices, is to simply re-purchase the movie again. And again and again. Consumers can "choose" to pay for the same movie on their iPhone, "choose" to pay for the same movie again on Android, and then "choose" to pay for the same movie once more on their PS3, for example.

Far from being a convincing argument, this is precisely PK's argument for making DVD ripping legal, that consumers shouldn't be made to fork out money for the same content over and over again, due to a legal measure designed to do something else. This is a perfect example of piracy laws being misused by content holders, for their own financial benefit, to take away a consumer's rights. The fact that many movies are not even available on legal platforms further destroys the MPAA's false arguments about "choice".

I sincerely hope the US Copyright Office does the right thing and extends the exemption for CD ripping to cover DVDs and Blu-rays too. The reason that The US Copyright Office even asks for submission of exemptions is to prevent exactly this sort of thing – short sighted copyright laws that harm fair use and innovation.

The Megaupload case has also had some new developments in the last few days, although nothing that bodes well for Mr DotCom. More charges have been laid, and $50 million in Mega assets have been seized so far. Without insider knowledge, it's hard to tell if this is an attempt to shore up the fed's case before going to court, or if it's some kind of tactic designed to force a favourable settlement. Copyright cases are not always easy to prove, see Viacom vs YouTube, and given the theatrics that has transpired so far, losing the case is not an option for federal prosecutors.

Meanwhile, the Pirate Bay and RIAA have been engaged in verbal warfare, with The Pirate Bay responding to an article by the RIAA that called it "one of the worst of the worst". More on both of these late breaking stories next week.

As mentioned earlier, due to Sony and Nintendo withholding hardware figures for the PS3 and Wii, I don't have enough data to write up a full NPD analysis, so you'll have to put up with a simplified version here.

Microsoft was the only one brave enough to release data, with the Xbox 360 selling 270,000 units, down 29% from a year ago. Microsoft also mentioned that it held 49% of the current-gen console market. A little maths then tells us that the PS3 and Wii sold a *combined* 281,000 units. With the PS3 and Wii selling in similar numbers usually, that's around 140,000 units for each, which is way down compared to the previous January's 319,000 (Wii) and 267,000 (PS3).

These companies can only hope that January was a fluke, and that sales will pick up again.

Game sales were just as bad, with the number one selling title, Modern Warfare 3, only shipping 386,000 units – at the same stage of sales, Black Ops managed 750,000 (although MW3 sold more copies in the preceding months, it's now flat in terms of sales to Black Ops), and Modern Warfare 2 managed 658,000 during its January period. And considering MW3 was the top seller, it means the other titles in the top 10 were much worse.

Overall, it's the worst January since 2004.

The results are so bad that analysts are still debating the whys of it, with Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter even questioning the validity of the data.

Maybe people are playing too much Skyrim to have time to buy any new games, just a thought!

And on that sour note, we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you enjoyed it, and see you next week.

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February 19, 2012	AV Splitter 1.2.1.1 Freeware
February 19, 2012	Windows 7 Codec Pack 3.9.0 Freeware
February 19, 2012	VideoLAN (VLC) 2.0.0 Freeware
February 19, 2012	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 1.4.5
February 18, 2012	EMDB 1.42 Freeware
February 18, 2012	Simple x264 Launcher 2012-02-18 Freeware
February 18, 2012	ProgDVB 6.83.2 Freeware
February 17, 2012	MediaCoder 2011 R10 5226 Freeware
February 17, 2012	MeGUI 2115 dev Freeware
February 17, 2012	BD Rebuilder 0.40.07 Beta Freeware
February 17, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.4.9 Freeware
February 17, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.4.9 Freeware
February 16, 2012	Orb 3.18.0011 Freeware
February 16, 2012	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.15.0
February 16, 2012	Codec Tweak Tool 5.1.5 Freeware
February 16, 2012	MLC Lossless Codec 1.1 (64-Bit) Freeware
February 16, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 5.9.0 Freeware
February 16, 2012	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 8.4.0 Freeware
February 16, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.4.0 Freeware
February 16, 2012	Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 4.8 Freeware
February 15, 2012	Windows Essentials Codec Pack 4.0 Freeware
February 15, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.4074 Freeware
February 15, 2012	Vegas Movie Studio 11 Build 295
February 15, 2012	All My Movies 6.9 build 1322
February 15, 2012	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.1.13 Freeware
February 15, 2012	XMedia Recode 3.0.8.0 Freeware
February 15, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.1.9
February 15, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.6.1.4072 Beta Freeware
February 14, 2012	Tribler 5.5.13 Freeware
February 14, 2012	Zoom Player Home Professional 8.1.1
February 14, 2012	Zoom Player Home MAX 8.1.1
February 14, 2012	Zoom Player Home Free 8.1.1 Freeware
February 14, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4323 (generic/x64) Freeware
February 13, 2012	DAEMON Tools 4.45.3 Freeware
February 13, 2012	LAV Filters 0.46 Freeware
February 13, 2012	VidCoder 1.3.0 Freeware
February 12, 2012	BDtoAVCHD 1.7.2 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 291

26 February, 2012

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

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

• PowerDVD 12 Review 

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another edition of the Weekly News Roundup. I've just finished writing the PowerDVD 12 review, and it only took me a month! Writing the obligatory PowerDVD review has become a sort of ritual for me, as I've been doing it since pretty much version 1.0 of the software (it's now version 12, not quite 12 years, but close to a decade at least). Over that time, the review has morphed slightly into a "how to" guide, or at the very least, an overview of the major functions. For this particular review though, I've completely restructured the review sections so that it's a bit easier to read. Now all I have to do is to write the review for the comparable WinDVD 11, which is only overdue by 5 month!

Skyrim update: Just managed to get my Alchemy and Smithing levels up to 100, now to get Enchanting up to 100, and to get the relevant perks so I can start making awesome, unstoppable armor and weapons. Had to purchase another house so I could more easily manage my hoarding.

We start the week with two stories that I briefly touched upon in the last WNR. First up, federal prosecutors have expanded the case against Megaupload, and revealed that over $50 million in "Mega assets" have been seized so far.

The newly added charges relate to the allegation that when content holders requested a file to be taken down, Megaupload merely removed the specified link to the file, without removing the actual file in question. This is problematic as the same file can be linked multiple times based on the way the Megaupload's server works, and so Megaupload was doing "just the minimum" (or not even that) when it came to file removal, even though they could (and should) have done more.  It's a lesson to other file sharing/user generated websites: take removal requests seriously if you want DMCA safe harbor to apply, otherwise, you might as well just ignore the take down request, since you're not fooling anyone. Pro-active content removal will help to make the case that you do care about copyright infringement, but the law does not require such actions, other than for really obvious cases of infringement. Had Megaupload done what was needed, then the criminal case against them might have been impossible to establish. On an unrelated note, Kim DotCom, the owner of Megaupload, was released on bail this week.

The Pirate Bay has had a busy February as well. Not only are they planning to remove all .torrent files, replacing them with Magnet Links instead, they've also changed domain names, from their original .org domain to .se. The reason for the change is fairly apparent – .org domain names comes under the authority of the United States, and so it could easily be seized by the US government (and I'm surprised they haven't done so). The fact that a Swedish website wants to avoid falling under the jurisdiction of the United States is perfectly understandable to everyone. Everyone except for the RIAA, of course, who came on attacking TPB for blatantly trying to "escape U.S. laws", the very same laws that doesn't apply to a Swedish website anyway. The RIAA appealed again to xenophobics, using phrases such as "foreign rogue sites" and blabbing on about "American jobs", despite music being a global industry, and piracy being a global problem. It's something `Winston' from The Pirate Bay spoke of when he wrote a response to the RIAA's latest attacks, that the America-centric view coming from the likes of the RIAA and MPAA, that somehow only US interests are important. Via SOPA/PIPA, the RIAA and MPAA have also started pointing the finger at the rest of the world,  blame "foreigners" for all their copyright woes, despite research showing their own short-sighted greediness (ie. release windows) is at the heart of the problem.

Another thing that Winston touched upon is the disingenuous use of the phrase "creative community" by these trade groups that often only represent a small number of major labels and studios. The truth is that not only are they not the creative community (or any kind of community, as Winston points out), but they're the ones that are most aggressive at exploiting and profiting from the same community, often at its expense (and that of real artists and real creativity).

And in order to keep exploiting and profiting, the major rights holders have shown they're willing and capable of doing anything in order to keep the money rolling in. For them, little things like censorship, privacy and the right to innovate, if counter to their own interests, can all be sacrificed. Which is why despite various EU rulings on the possible illegality of web censorship, the music industry is still pursuing, and winning, their case against The Pirate Bay in the UK, and it's looking increasingly likely that UK ISPs will soon be forced to block access to the website. Not that it would actually stop people visiting, since earlier blocked sites such as Newzbin2 are still being frequented by UK visitors using tools that were quickly developed to bypass the blocking filters – the operators of Newzbin2 says that 93% of their former UK visitors have continued to visit the website thanks to these new tools. There are also all sorts of jurisdictional issues involved, such as whether an UK ISP has the right to block access to a Swedish website to protect the interest of US companies.

And with the web now an integral part of most people's lives, nobody wants to see it irrevocably damaged. But even so, I was really surprised to see so many people protesting the controversial ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty in the streets of Europe. And it's working, with the EU suspending ratification of ACTA until the legal positions are studied in further detail, which should have been the case all along, as opposed to cowardly caving to corporate interests. The usual critics will demean these protests as "freeloaders wanting to keep the free stuff coming", but people who say that are also devaluing the importance of critical issues of censorship and privacy, issues at the heart of any democracy. I guess in some ways this is a delayed response to the sacrifices that have been made in the last decade to these core issues, due to fears of terrorism. I strongly agree that people who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither, but at the very least, that response is an understandable human one (even if it is the wrong one). But sacrificing freedom for the benefit of a select few mega-corporations is just not acceptable, and I'm glad others feel the same way too. Freedom and democracy is worth protecting at the expense of everything else, in my opinion.

With this WNR coming in a little bit short, I have a bit more room to share a few recent thoughts about where things are headed in terms of home entertainment.

While I've long been a supporter of Internet based streaming, and the benefits of video-on-demand, I've not really had much experience using it, since we're pretty behind the rest of the world here in Australia when it comes to these sort of things. Having got a Kindle Fire to do a bit of development work, I soon became absolutely hooked to Amazon Prime SVOD. It's really my first taste at what Americans have been enjoying for a while now (and with better services than Amazon Prime, and not having to route it through a VPN), and it completely confirms for me what, up until that point, had largely been a theory – that we're on the verge of a major revolution in how we watch TV and movies. It's not so much what we watch, as what we have access to. It feels incredibly powerful and freeing to know that you have access to, for example, every episode of Star Trek ever made (which is available for unlimited streaming on Amazon Prime, as long as you pay the $79 per year membership fee), and the phrase "there's nothing on" could very well become extinct if the technology continues to advance, and if content holders continue to support innovation in this area. And once you go VOD, you don't really want to go back to a time where executive in suits determine what you should watch, and when.

And it's a huge financial opportunity as well for all involved. From an advertising point of view, ads can be targeted, interactive and non repetitive, and the tiered subscription model provides value, as well as ensuring stability revenue wise (compared to a model based purely on ads). That nearly 1 in 3 American households now regularly enjoy streaming content on their TV (so not just something you do on a tablet, or a computer, but in the living room) shows that people want it. It's now up to the tech companies and the rights holders to knock out a deal that would make the ability to access everything an affordable reality, and I look forward to the day this is all available in Australia.

On that bright note, it's time to say goodbye to this issue of the WNR. Have a good one, and see you next week.

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February 26, 2012	SMPlayer 0.7.0.3937 unstable Freeware
February 26, 2012	ProgDVB 6.83.3 Freeware
February 26, 2012	BD Rebuilder 0.40.08 Beta Freeware
February 26, 2012	madVR 0.81 Freeware
February 26, 2012	AV Splitter 1.2.1.4 Beta Freeware
February 25, 2012	PlayOn 3.4.37.2912
February 25, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.5.1 Freeware
February 25, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.5.1 Freeware
February 25, 2012	LAV Filters 0.48 Freeware
February 24, 2012	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.15.1
February 24, 2012	LameXP 4.04 Beta 2 Freeware
February 24, 2012	Vista Codec Package 6.2.5 Freeware
February 24, 2012	Tribler 5.5.17 Freeware
February 24, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.32007 Stable Freeware
February 23, 2012	SUPER 2011.build.50 Freeware
February 23, 2012	BDtoAVCHD 1.7.3 Freeware
February 23, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.4.4 Freeware
February 23, 2012	Simple x264 Launcher 2012-02-22 Freeware
February 23, 2012	Free Video Dub 2.0.5 Freeware
February 23, 2012	Free 3GP Video Converter 5.0.6 Freeware
February 22, 2012	Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder 6.1.8
February 22, 2012	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.1.17 Freeware
February 22, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.6.1.4081 Beta Freeware
February 22, 2012	MkvToMp4 0.219 Freeware
February 22, 2012	MCEBuddy 2.1.2 Freeware
February 21, 2012	Avanti 0.6.7 Freeware
February 21, 2012	4Media DVD Creator for Mac 7.0.2.1214
February 21, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.2.0
February 21, 2012	XMedia Recode 3.0.8.1 Freeware
February 20, 2012	ReClock DirectShow Filter 1.8.7.9 Freeware
February 20, 2012	TMP - Thies Media Project 0.1.7.29 Freeware
February 20, 2012	MPEG-2 Transport Stream packet analyser 2.4.1.2 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 292

4 March, 2012

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

• WinDVD 11 Review 

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

As promised, the WinDVD 11 is up. WinDVD and PowerDVD have long been competitors, but with Cyberlink deciding to make PowerDVD into more than just a multimedia player, it seems Corel has gone the opposite direction and has decided to focus on the core features, and compensate by reducing the price. It's not a bad strategy, since while the new version of PowerDVD does do a lot more, especially as a media hub, there are better, more dedicated software available. That's not to say PowerDVD's core features are being ignored – it's more of a case of them being very good already and having little room for improvement and Cyberlink having to seek other ways to improve their software and justify the price of the upgrade. WinDVD, on the other hand, still has room to improve everywhere, and they've made some good progress in the latest version (which only took me 5 month to review).

If I seem a bit obsessed with the PowerDVD/WinDVD rivalry, it's because I am, having done the reviews for both many many times over the last decade. You know you have to be obsessed over something when your other, more current obsession, had to take a back seat to it. Which brings us to …

Skyrim Update: Having mastered Alchemy, Smithing and Enchanting, I made myself some awesome Daedric armor and weapons. Am now able to slice and dice my way through almost any levelled enemy. Yes, even giants!

As for news, it's been pretty quiet, with a lot of the focus on stories already covered previously (like The Pirate Bay's transition to Magnet Links on the day that Leap Day William visits), or more incremental updates on the whole Megaupload prosecution (with just the right dash of character assassination against Mr. Dotcom, although he does make it easy).

Again, it's a week where we only have a couple of copyright related news items, we start with a real world example of why Internet censorship can be very hard to get right, and very easy to get very very wrong.

Apparently, users of at least one ISP in Denmark were denied access to 8,000 legitimate websites, including Facebook and Google due to a SNAFU with the country's voluntary Internet filtering scheme. Apparently, the legitimate 8,000 strong list of "good" websites was uploaded in place of a list of "bad" websites, due to operator error and poor operating procedures. The problem wasn't corrected until 3 hours, and many complaints later. Now, it has to be said that the filter is predominantly used to block access to websites containing indecent images of children, a noble intent and something that's worth doing (although my understanding is that these filters are often easily bypassed anyway). But if the rationale behind the filter changes to be about protecting the business interests of the likes of Sony and Universal, then not only would it detract from the more serious work of preventing access to child pornography, there's also more room for error, as the sheer number of websites that needs to be blocked will increase incrementally from day one. And the biggest fear is not that 8,000 legitimate websites get blocked, but rather, just the odd couple of less than popular websites getting incorrectly blocked – a small enough error that's hard to notice and even harder for the affected websites to rectify, without any sort of  due process.

There are two more SNAFUs to go through this week, one intentional, and one not so much. We start with the intentional one in Germany, in which (and I've only been made recently aware of) the country's performance royalty collection organisation, GEMA, has apparently been waging a bitter way against YouTube (that's *so* 2007). The repercussion from the dispute means that people in Germany have been missing out on access to a lot of legal YouTube music content. Not that any of this is that new, but it was brought up again this week by a Twitter post, in which one user complained about having to use Chinese web proxies to access Sting's new official music video, a situation the user describes as "f*cked up". The irony here of course is the use of Chinese web proxies, not exactly a country well known for its Internet freedoms.

The short term greed and irrational fear of the Internet by some content holders (and those seeking to profit from content) is exactly why, in my opinion, web piracy is such a big problem today. For every user that resorted to a Chinese web proxy, more will have probably went onto their favourite BitTorrent network and downloaded the music video. And as a result, YouTube is denied profit, Sting is denied the ability to connect to fans via official channels, and nobody really benefits. It's such a problem that even some of the music labels have started complaining about GEMA's actions, because revenues are starting to be affected.

As many smarter than me have already said, access is the key problem, and it's a key driver behind the web piracy. It might have been possible in the past to deny access to content in order to reap better financial rewards, but that's when people didn't have the tools at their disposal to seek alternative, and illegal, access to the same content. The same strategy doesn't work any more, basically. This web comic (note: rude words present), which explains the process of trying to watch Game of Thrones online, tells the whole story about access problems better than I ever could with words. And it's even worse in places outside of the US, as the "Game of Thrones" situation is repeated for pretty much every TV show, and without access to cable and network TV options either. There are huge financial opportunities being missed right now due to content being made unavailable due to short term greed – instead, money is being wasted on anti-piracy, and our rights are being trampled in order to fight the ultimate futile fight. Make content available, and at for a reasonable price (not $40 for a season pass, when the Blu-ray set can be had for the same price), then the piracy problem will solve itself!

From the absurd to the, um, even more absurd – how about getting your YouTube video flagged for using copyrighted music, when the only "songs" on your video's soundtrack is that of birds? That's exactly what happened to one YouTube users, whose video about collecting wild vegetation for making a vegan salad turned out to be a controversial one. Music licensing firm Rumblefish made not one, but two claims on the video's soundtrack, first after YouTube's automated system flagged the video, and second when the user's appeal (something along the lines of "it's just birds singing", most likely) was turned down. And I bet it's not an isolated incident either, and it probably wouldn't have been resolved to the original user's satisfaction without the attention it garnered online (and unfortunately, not all incidents gets reported or gets the attention it needs). With the copyright claimed, Rumblefish were free to make money off a video that they had no rights to, so isn't that the very definition of copyright infringement? And isn't it a lot worse than what many YouTube "pirates" are doing, considering many of them are not doing it for money?

The silly DRM news of the week goes to Microsoft, Google and Netflix's attempt to add DRM to HTML5 videos. HTML5 videos have been designed to allow browsers to offer native support for streaming videos without the need for a separate plug-in like Flash. But Flash supports DRM, and so the likes of Microsoft, Google and Netflix would like to see some form of DRM added to the HTML5 standard. It's unworkable though, as one Google engineer points out, because this would mean open source browser makers would have to use proprietary, closed sourced code for the DRM component, or fail to fully support HTML5. The cynical side of me can see why Microsoft and Google, who make competing browsers to the open source Opera and Firefox, would want to see this happen. But I can forgive them because I know deep down, they don't want DRM either – they have to implement them in order to satisfy the wishes of paranoid content holder though.

And we really get back to the core problem – paranoid content holders.

Nothing else to cover this week, so it's time to say goodbye for now (and hello again to the world of Skyrim). See you next week.

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March 3, 2012	MediaPortal 2.0 Alpha Freeware
March 3, 2012	All My Movies 6.9 build 1323
March 3, 2012	Codec Tweak Tool 5.2.2 Freeware
March 3, 2012	XBMC media center Eden 11.0 RC2 Freeware
March 3, 2012	Tribler 5.5.20 Freeware
March 3, 2012	SMPlayer 0.7.1 Freeware
March 2, 2012	MP4Converter.net's MP4 Converter for Mac 7.1.0.20120223
March 2, 2012	MCEBuddy 2.1 Release 3 Freeware
March 2, 2012	Audials Radiotracker 9
March 2, 2012	Audials Moviebox 9
March 2, 2012	Audials Tunebite Platinum 9
	More updates from RapidSolution Software AG...
March 2, 2012	VideoReDo TVSuite with H.264 4.20.7.634 Beta
March 2, 2012	Scenegrabber.NET 0.9.4.0 Freeware
March 2, 2012	CDBurnerXP 4.4.0.2971 Freeware
March 2, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.5.3 Freeware
March 2, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.5.3 Freeware
March 2, 2012	Sublight 3.2.0 Freeware
March 2, 2012	Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 5.0 Freeware
March 2, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.4.8 Freeware
March 2, 2012	LameXP 4.04 Beta 4 Freeware
March 1, 2012	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.15.2
March 1, 2012	Any Video Converter Free 3.3.5 Freeware
March 1, 2012	BurnAware Free Edition 4.7 Beta Update Freeware
March 1, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.6.1.4111 Beta Freeware
March 1, 2012	Vegas Pro 11 Build 595
March 1, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.2.1
February 29, 2012	LAME MP3 Encoder 3.99.5 Freeware
February 29, 2012	AV Splitter 1.2.1.6 Beta Freeware
February 29, 2012	Vista Codec Package 6.2.6 Freeware
February 29, 2012	Nero Multimedia Suite 11.2
February 29, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.4109 Freeware
February 28, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4342 (generic/x64) Freeware
February 28, 2012	Simple x264 Launcher 2012-02-27 Freeware
February 28, 2012	Subtitle Editor 0.40.0 Freeware
February 27, 2012	Bino 1.3.0 Dev Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 293

11 March, 2012

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. I hope you've had a good week. Me? I've been busy with a secret project for Digital Digest, something I hope I can unveil in a week or two. Well, it's not really a secret, but it's not ready for public consumption just yet. It will be a relatively small change on the scale of things, but hopefully one that will make navigating the website a little bit easier.

As such, I haven't really been playing much Skyrim this week. I might also be playing the game the wrong way, because I now have quite a backlog of major and minor quests that's going to be a pain to clear (and I keep on picking up new ones). Sometimes having too much to do in a game can be a frustrating experience too.

I suppose I should also mention the iPad 3, oops, I mean the "new iPad". It seems I'm not the only one that's under-whelmed by Apple's new tablet offering (and not the only one to cringe at the "resolutionary" pun either). There's really nothing wrong at all with the new iPad – it's faster, it's a little bit heavier than the iPad 2 but does not affect usability, the screen is a beauty and the price is right too. So why am I under-whelmed? For me, it's the lack of "the new things you can do with it" that's under-whelming – a sharper screen is better, but how does that translate into a new way to use the iPad?

Apple's strength has always been in selling what you can do with its hardware, rather than the hardware itself (which traditionally hasn't been state-of-the-art – see Mac vs PC debate). For example, Apple didn't sell the fact that the iPad 2 had a front facing camera, it sold the concept of FaceTime. The iPod also wasn't the first digital music player, but Apple sold it, alone with iTunes, as a new way to buy music. I won't even need to mention what the iPhone meant, but even the incremental 4S upgrade introduced Siri, a new way to use your smart device that unexpected failed to make the transition to the new iPad (not yet, anyway). Imagine if Apple had launched the iPhone 4S without Siri – that, to me, is what the new iPad feels like.

With that said though, the new iPad still looks like a no brainer for people who want an easy to use tablet, so it will sell in droves regardless. But I just think Apple could have marketed it a bit better, to at least give us a glimpse of what the faster processor, better screen is capable of, that makes the iPad 2 obsolete. But maybe that's not the strategy this time, as perhaps the major change this time is the introduction of a new budget iPad model – the old iPad 2. Good enough for most people, and at $399, it will offer serious competition to budget Android tablets.

Anyway, let's get started on the news roundup.

The impact of the Megaupload seizure continues to reverberate this week, as the MPAA now wants to use the seizure as proof of guilt in its own court case.

Back when the Mega-seizure happened, I mentioned the MPAA's civil lawsuit against Hotfile, and how Hotfile and Megaupload's business models were very similar. I suggested that if no criminal case had been brought up against Hotfile, and that the matter was largely proceeding on civil grounds, then what makes Megaupload so different that the FBI needs to get involved. This week though, the MPAA made the same argument, but the one on the other side of the coin, that because Hotfile and Megaupload were so similar, Hotfile is just as guilty, and so the court should hand down a summary judgement on the matter. The MPAA is using the fact that because a court has granted federal prosecutors the right to take such drastic actions against Megaupload, that there is already enough evidence to suggest that their business model would not stand up to scrutiny in a court of law. There's is some merit to the argument, but the government has yet to prove its case against Megaupload in a court of law, no matter how convincing their (one sided, it has to be said) arguments have been so far.

The curious thing is that if the MPAA is granted a summary judgement against Hotfile, then this decision could be used in the Megaupload trial as some sort of precedent, even though the summary judgement may have only occurred due to the Megaupload case. It's a kind of circular logic that could very well have been orchestrated by the MPAA (since the MPAA are one of the key instigators of the Megaupload takedown), to kill two birds with one stone.

The scale of the Mega-takedown has also had consequences for other governments and law enforcement agencies not wanting to look weak on copyright (I'm sure the likes of the RIAA and MPAA have been pressuring them to match the efforts shown by the US government). The Swedish government has no doubt been under a lot of pressure to take action against "Swedish" website The Pirate Bay, particular now that the website has switched to using a Swedish .se domain name. What the Swedish government wasn't aware of was that investigative notes were being leaked to the operators of The Pirate Bay. And from those leaks, it appears a new series of raids and arrests might be occurring soon. Having already been raided once, which took the website down for a whole three days, the new Pirate Bay seems to be designed to be much more resilient, much harder to take down (and easier to get back up again). The cat and mouse games between the authorities and TPB has only managed to create a stronger mouse – the cat simply hasn't been able to keep up.

Staying in Europe, last week, the UK High Court handed down a ruling that paves the way for ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. This week, another ruling against ISPs paves the way for the UK's own version of "three-strikes" to go ahead, as the Court of Appeal upheld the legality of such a system. Not that there's any evidence to suggest that  graduated response, the technical term for "three-strikes", actually works. I recently read that the French version of three-strikes, nicknamed Hadopi (after the government agency responsible for it) is costing as much as $90 million per year to run. Whereas the only evidence of the program's success so far, that has been presented by rights holder, is a measly 5% increase in revenue for iTunes over a 2 year period. Considering that iTunes sales worldwide (and with most countries not having a three-strikes regime) went up 36% year-on-year based on Q3 2011 results, the measly 5%, over a 2 year period, seems quite insignificant, and might even point to the opposite conclusion if we're being cavalier with our statistical analysis. To me, graduated response simply isn't worth it from a financial point of view, and it's definitely not worth it when you factor in loss of privacy and other rights.

Losses due to piracy has always been a debatable subject. Whether someone who pirated software ever intended to buy the same thing is almost impossible to predict, as it's really hard to know what people are wiling and unwilling to pay for. Take Warner Bros. latest idea, their "Disc to Digital" program. The program asks DVD owners to drive to a retail store, hand their original disc to a clerk, who runs the disc through a special machine that eventually produces a purely digital version of the disc, for use on iPads and whatnot (complete with DRM, of course). WB thinks people are willing to not only go to the trouble of doing this, as opposed to simply ripping it at home, but that they're also willing to pay for the same movie twice. And so if people are not doing it WB's way, and they're not making this extra profit, then WB will simply count this as "lost" revenue, and blame it all on home DVD ripping.

If you think WB's legal DVD ripping solution is convoluted, then you're not alone, because public interest group Public Knowledge also think it's ridiculous to suggest that consumers would embrace this "alternative". PK is currently petitioning the US Copyright Office to legalize DVD ripping, and one of the arguments put forward by movie studios, against the idea, is that legal alternatives exist – WB's "Disc to Digital" being one of the examples referenced by the MPAA. There's obviously a demand for DVD ripping, even the movie industry accepts this is the case, as otherwise, they wouldn't be offering their own solution to the problem. But if this is the industry's idea of adapting to consumer demand, then it really just highlights again how out of touch they have become, and how we really shouldn't trust their idea of "lost revenue".

And finally in copyright, a story about our good friends Righthaven, and possible one of the last ever stories on the infamous copyright firm. This week, a judge granted the request to auction off most of Righthaven's existing copyrights, including the very rights they obtained for sue-for-settlement purposes. Without having any rights to the content they're pursuing bloggers and non-profits for copying, it really puts an end to all of their pending lawsuits (and appeals), and this, more than anything, is a mortal blow for the firm. Unless Righthaven can manage a revival of Lazarushian proportions, I suspect the next story I write on the firm will be its obituary.

In gaming news, the NPD stats for February 2012 are out, and it looks like I *will* be able to write an analysis for it thanks to there being enough data.

The Xbox 360 won the month again, although both the PS3 and Wii recovered from the January lows. All are down compared to the same month last year though. The lack of any really good releases, and the fact that we may be getting towards the end of the current generation's sales cycle (or at least well past the midway point), suggests that sales won't be picking up until the next-gen comes out.

Speaking of next-gen, the latest rumour says the Xbox 720 or whatever may in fact be disc-less. So definitely no Blu-ray playback if that's the case, although I think physical media are still very much needed to distribute multi Gigabyte games to millions of gamers given the current state of high speed (ie. 40Mbps or faster) broadband saturation. The same argument exists for HD movies, which is why Blu-ray discs will still be around for a while yet.

I think that covers everything for this week, so have a nice one and see you in seven.

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March 11, 2012	Subtitle Edit 3.2.4 Freeware
March 11, 2012	LAV Filters 0.49 Freeware
March 11, 2012	HDPVR Capture 2.12.1 Freeware
March 11, 2012	x264 VFW Codec Build 2183 Freeware
March 11, 2012	MKVToolnix 5.4.0 Freeware
March 11, 2012	LameXP 4.04 Beta 6 Freeware
March 10, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.4137 Freeware
March 10, 2012	AV Splitter 1.2.1.8 Beta Freeware
March 10, 2012	MeGUI 2117 dev Freeware
March 10, 2012	IsoBuster 2.9.2 Beta
March 10, 2012	MediaCoder 2011 R11 5230 Freeware
March 10, 2012	Windows 8 Codecs 1.0.3 Freeware
March 10, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.5.5 Freeware
March 10, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.5.5 Freeware
March 9, 2012	VideoStudio Pro X5
March 9, 2012	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.15.3
March 9, 2012	4Media iPod Video Converter for Mac 7.1.0.20120223
March 9, 2012	Subler 0.15 beta 3 Freeware
March 9, 2012	ccextractor 0.61 Freeware
March 9, 2012	SMPlayer 0.7.1.4044 unstable Freeware
March 9, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.32392 Beta Freeware
March 9, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.2.3
March 9, 2012	PlayOn 3.4.38.2949
March 8, 2012	Windows 7 Codec Pack 4.0.1 Freeware
March 8, 2012	x264 r2183 Freeware
March 8, 2012	SolveigMM AVI Trimmer + MKV 2.0.1203.7 Freeware
March 8, 2012	SolveigMM Video Splitter 3.0.1203.7
March 8, 2012	J. River Media Center 17.0.99 Beta
March 8, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.5.0 Freeware
March 8, 2012	madVR 0.82.4 Freeware
March 7, 2012	BurnAware Free Edition 4.7 Freeware
March 7, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.6.1.4128 Beta Freeware
March 7, 2012	EMDB 1.44 Freeware
March 6, 2012	WM Capture 6.0.1
March 6, 2012	MCEBuddy 2.1 Release 4 Freeware
March 5, 2012	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 1.4.6
March 5, 2012	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.1.21 Freeware
March 5, 2012	PopCorn MKV AudioConverter 1.86.0 Freeware
March 5, 2012	Volume Limiter 3.0 Freeware
March 5, 2012	VidCoder 1.3.1 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 294

18 March, 2012

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

• Game Consoles – February 2012 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

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2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another issue of the WNR. As promised, I put up the February US video game sales analysis earlier in the week. Nothing too surprising, just your usual "everything is doomed" set of stats. Is this a case of having a new normal, with the previous normal having been exaggerated by the success of the Wii, or something more sinister? With Microsoft saying this week they won't be showing a new Xbox at E3 this year, and Sony in a similar state of mind, it will be up to the Wii U to save the coming holiday season it seems.

Work meant that my Skyrim adventures had to take a back seat this week, although I still had time to kill a vampire or two, a couple of giants (now much more easily dispatched via my legendary enchanted Daedric weapons), and the odd chicken via collateral damage.

Oh, it was also my birthday last week. I wonder at what age do you stop looking forward to your birthdays, and start dreading them because you're getting older? For me, this happened on my 7th birthday.

Let's get started with this WNR.

Big news for US web users this week, as from July onwards, your ISP will officially start spying on your net activities for big content (ie. the RIAA and MPAA).

With very little evidence showing "graduated response" actually works to increase revenue, remembering that this, and not reducing piracy, is the ultimate goal, it will be interesting to see what the American version can amount to. It will be different to the French version though, in that each ISPs can decide to take whatever action it deems necessary, including no specific action and just a continuing series of warnings – with permanent account suspension not being considered so far.

It marks an important milestone in the war against piracy, and along with the RIAA's victory over LimeWire a couple of years ago, the closing of Megaupload (and others) this year, you'd expect that piracy rates would start dropping, if it hasn't already. Yet, all you continue to hear is how the industry is still losing billions of dollars every year, and how the problem is getting worse. With the RIAA and MPAA getting what they wanted this time, yet again, would it then be safe to conclude that, if a year from now and with revenue still not up significantly, that enforcing copyright may not actually lead to increased revenue? I've always found the idea of people hoarding tons of money saved from piracy, instead of simply spending the money on something else, quite funny. As is the idea of people spending more money than they actually have, when their supply of pirated content is cut off (which is an impossibility in itself).

But according to the likes of the RIAA and MPAA, piracy is a $58 billion dollar a year problem, and that if the piracy problem is magically solved somehow, creative industries would suddenly gain most of that back in revenue. But with the RIAA and MPAA already equating every single instance of copyright infringement to be worth at least $150,000,  via their much publicized lawsuits against students and single mothers, $58 billion may even seem a conservative figure. This "Copyright Maths" is the topic of a new TED speech by Rhapsody founder Rob Reid, a short must-watch video that shows how crazy the figures being thrown around really are. That an iPod classic can hold $8 billion worth of pirated songs based on the $150,000 calculation show how ridiculous it all it (a figure almost as ridiculous as the $40,000+ people are required to pay to fill up the same iPod with legal purchase).

And after the speech, Reid was asked what would be the best way to combat piracy. The answer was basically "give the people what they want", by building legal services that people wanted to use, that makes piracy seem not worth the trouble. Do that, and the piracy problem will solve it self. Why go to the trouble of finding and downloading each song, when you have Spotify and millions of songs for instant gratification, for example. The same is probably even more true for movies, which are harder to download due to their larger file size (which also limits the amount of archived content that's made available).

The problem is though that instead of giving people what they want, the movie and music industries are actually pursuing the opposite agenda. It cannot be better demonstrated than by the legal decision this week which banned Kaleidescape from selling its DVD and Blu-ray media servers. Piracy was just a convenient excuse for the body responsible for DVD copy protection, the DVD CCA, to legally pursue Kaleidescape, despite the core audience of Kaleidescape's servers not being pirates at all. In fact, Kaleidescape demonstrated the amazing fact that, on average, each of their customers had a legal movie library of 500 titles or more. Considering the cost of these server set ups, it's not hard to understand why this is the case, because their product is one for serious movie lovers with the required expendable income – and these people are not movie pirates. In fact, they're probably the movie industry's most hard-core customers.

So what does the industry have to gain by denying their biggest fans what they want?  The answer is of course "control". They're perfectly happy to let you "convert" your DVDs to a purely digital format, with Wal-Mart this week offering a "DVD to Ultraviolet" service for $2 (or $4 to "upconvert" your DVDs to a HD digital version). But as always, it comes with a catch. You'll have to use the movie studio's preferred platform, live with their DRM system, which then controls how you'll be able to use your digital copy (which may even expire in time). It will invariably mean a worse user experience than something for enthusiasts like Kaleidescape, but a better experience may mean a loss of control, and that's just not acceptable. And if all of this means they can charge you again and again for the same thing, then that's just a sweet, sweet bonus.

With the new iPad still making headlines, I thought I would jump on the bandwagon and write something about what could be considered Apple's first HD tablet (1024×768 is not HD, as if it was, then it meant that I had HD on my first 486 computer).

With the new iPad resolution coming in at 2K, or 2048×1536, that's a resolution higher than your average HDTV. Of course, a true enthusiasts won't just see the fact that the screen would perfectly render a 1920×1080 resolution video with a couple of pixels to spare, they will of course wonder if you could expand the resolution of the video from 1920 to 2048 and use up all of the available pixels for a 2048×1152 video.

But what may be more interesting is how Apple plans to distribute 1080p movies to the new iPad, as streaming of 25GB+ movies is not ideal, even with 4G. Ars Technica took the time to test several of iTunes' new 1080p encodes, and compared it to the Blu-ray equivalent, and what they found was rather surprising – that somehow, a 5GB iTunes file isn't 5 times worse in quality than a 25GB Blu-ray. By supporting the "High" H.264 profile, as well as increasing the "Level" support to 4.1, all now possible on the faster hardware of the new iPad (and iPhone 4S, as well as the updated Apple TV), the decoder can now be made to do more work, and the result is a more efficient encode. VUDU's HDX does something similar to allow 1080p streaming on your average 10Mbps connection (Blu-ray, on the other hand, may require 30Mbps just for the video). Sure, you'll lose a lot of fine detail, there will be banding and other aberrations, but that's all moot on a 9.7? screen. On a large screen TV connected via Apple TV, this may be an issue, but only for those serious about their movie watching, in which case, they would probably never consider Apple TV or iTunes 1080p anyway. For the rest, it's "good enough", and the convenience of it all makes up for everything else.

Mac Observer did similar tests but found wildly different results, so either Ars Technica did their test wrong, or Mac Observer did (or maybe video quality varies too much from movie to movie).

And with that, we come to the end of another WNR. See you next week.

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

March 18, 2012	WM Capture 6.0.2
March 18, 2012	PS3 Media Server 1.51.0 Freeware
March 17, 2012	ProgDVB 6.84 Freeware
March 17, 2012	Sublight 3.3.0 Freeware
March 17, 2012	FFmpeg 0.10.1 Freeware
March 17, 2012	XMedia Recode 3.0.8.5 Freeware
March 17, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.4151 Freeware
March 17, 2012	SMPlayer 0.7.1.4110 unstable Freeware
March 17, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.32572 Beta Freeware
March 16, 2012	TS-Doctor 1.2.5 Freeware
March 16, 2012	Tribler 5.5.23 Freeware
March 16, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.5.7 Freeware
March 16, 2012	Windows 8 Codecs 1.0.4 Freeware
March 16, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.5.7 Freeware
March 15, 2012	VideoReDo TVSuite with H.264 4.20.7.635 Beta
March 14, 2012	TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5.2.3.66
March 14, 2012	SolveigMM AVI Trimmer + MKV 2.0.1203.13 Freeware
March 14, 2012	TMPGEnc Authoring Works 5.0.5.22
March 14, 2012	GOM Media Player 2.1.39.5101 Freeware
March 14, 2012	DVBViewer 4.9.5
March 14, 2012	Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 5.1 Freeware
March 14, 2012	MediaCoder 2011 R11 5233 Freeware
March 14, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.6.1.4139 Beta Freeware
March 14, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.5.2 Freeware
March 14, 2012	Simple x264 Launcher 2012-03-14 Freeware
March 14, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4382 (generic/x64) Freeware
March 14, 2012	x264 VFW Codec Build 2184 Freeware
March 13, 2012	MediaInfo 0.7.54 Freeware
March 13, 2012	x264 r2184 Freeware
March 12, 2012	BDtoAVCHD 1.7.4 Freeware
March 12, 2012	DVD slideshow GUI 0.9.5.0 Freeware
March 12, 2012	AV Splitter 1.2.1.9 Freeware
March 12, 2012	Mp3tag 2.50 Freeware
March 12, 2012	madVR 0.82.5 Freeware
March 12, 2012	SubExtractor 1.0.2.6 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 295

25 March, 2012

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INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Two weeks ago, I mentioned I was working on a project for Digital Digest that should be ready in about two weeks time. Unfortunately, the same is still true today, as I'm still working on it, and it's still (at least) two week away from being ready.

And the delay is totally unrelated to Skyrim, or the fact that I unceremoniously passed 100 hours of play time this week. Most of what I've been doing in the game this week has been very "chore-ish", having spent most of yesterday's playtime moving from my house in Whiterun to Riften – meaning multiple trips carrying the assortment of goodies and junk that I've been hoarding at my old house, fast travelling the many miles between the two hamlets, all the while not wearing any clothes as to clear up as much carrying weight as possible. Trust me, it's not as fun as it sounds.

A couple of interesting stories to go through this week, so let's get started.

Google has dragged itself into the Megaupload affair by coming to the defence of Hotfile, or rather, the defence of the DMCA's "safe harbor" provision.

The MPAA is currently suing Hotfile, and one of the argument that the industry trade body has made is that Hotfile should not be afforded the protection of "safe harbor", due to the "rampant" nature of piracy that goes on on the file sharing website. Another argument is that Hotfile has not been cooperating with the MPAA fully in terms of providing the technical anti-piracy measures that the MPAA studios want. Google says both of these arguments are invalid because current case law does not strip away "safe harbor" based on "generalized awareness that unspecified (or even `rampant') infringement is occurring", and that there's nothing in the law that says Hotfile must implement the type of content filtering that the rights holder requests, as the decision is mostly left up to the service provider.

Both of these arguments have been made against Megaupload too in the government's criminal case against the file hosting website. And another key argument in the government's case, which was also employed by the MPAA in the case against Hotfile, is that the website operators only removed content that had been specifically listed by the rights holder, and deliberately kept similar or even the exact same content on their network. Google argues that this is perfectly in-line with the spirit of the DMCA, with the burden of identifying infringing content belonging to rights holders (the only people that can decide which content should  be removed and which should be kept). The argument works a little better for Google's assets, such as YouTube, than for Hotfile/Megaupload though – it's often in the rights holder's interest to keep some "infringing" content active on YouTube due to promotional reasons, while at the same time removing others (even if it's the same video, re-uploaded). With Hotfile/Megaupload, it's unlikely that, for example, Warner Bros. would want to keep a copy of The Dark Knight available for download, but in Google's view, Hotfile did exactly what the DMCA demanded it to do, nothing less, but certainly nothing more than what's required, such as removing content that was not specifically listed.

Rapidshare, in a German court, is also facing similar accusations, and as a result, it could be forced to implement drastic site-wide filtering for all uploads.

The issue of how proactive a service provider should be is at the heart of the DMCA "safe harbor" argument, with content holders now accusing Internet companies of "abusing" the protection afforded to them by the provision, by deliberately turning a blind eye to ongoing infringement just because it has not be specifically named. But the alternative is for service providers to "second guess" the intentions, and the legal rights, of content holders, to take a "better safe than sorry" approach, the collateral damage from such actions which will mean a lot of harm to innovation and creativity (and is ever more the problem on YouTube, with its automated "Content ID" system and false positives). I don't know what the answer is, but draconian blanket bans and filtering can't be the best solution out there, not when there's still so much that content holders can do to make the legal option the more enticing one. The DMCA, conceived by the likes of the MPAA, is already far too biased towards rights holders at the expense of innovation and creativity – but it seems it's still not biased enough, hence the "need" for PIPA/SOPA/ACTA.

And the not so subtle bias in current copyright laws has also produced a climate of fear and uncertainty, with most people unaware of their actual rights when it comes to these kind of disputes. This has led to mass copyright lawsuits that use the fear, and sometimes the embarrassment, to "encourage" users to pay a pre-trial settlement fee to make the matter go away. It's no wonder it's been referred to as "legal blackmail". But if you take this just one step further, something that many consider ethically suspect turns into an outright scam, and report this week suggest that Megaupload users are now being targeted. A fake mass copyright style letter is being sent to potential Megaupload users demanding a settlement fee, or the threat of a 10,000 euros lawsuit. The small matter of the law firm responsible for these letters not actually existing should be the first clue as to the validity of these claims, and also the fact that payments being made is going to a Slovakian bank account, for a law firm that's supposed to be based in Munich.

Unfortunately, the MPAA's actions may have only added to the believability of these scams , when they requested the web host of Megaupload to retain data, including user data, for future potential lawsuits. But even the MPAA knows the public's distaste for this kind of thing, so they did make it clear that individual user lawsuits are not on the cards. A civil case against Megaupload and its "intermediaries", on the other hand, now seems more than likely.

Moving on, Ubisoft this week hinted that the company might be suffering from a split-personality disorder when the company's VP of Digital Publishing, Chris Early, spoke about intrusive DRM and how it's doing paying customers a disservice. Not only that, Early says that Ubisoft really really wants to make DRM "go away" (I've got an idea where Ubisoft can put their DRM), and they think the best way to do it is through adding value to the legitimate gaming experience (they can start by not making the legitimate gaming experience a pain in the butt, thanks to their DRM). But what Early may be hinting at is the business model of MMO's and how Ubisoft can learn from it, by incorporating some of the elements that keep people coming back (and paying) into the single player experience. I'm not sure ham-fisting MMO elements and the subscription model into single player games, along with a MMO's requirement of always being online (which, for a single player game, is nothing more than a DRM. UbiDRM to be exact), is the best idea to be honest. Making better games, lowering the price, and providing online features, ongoing support, and exclusive content, might all be better solutions.

Flags of truce came out this week in the HTML5 vs Flash vs H.264 vs WebM/Theora war, as Mozilla signaled their surrender. Sort of.

A little bit of background: The issue surrounds HTML5's new ability to allow videos to embedded and played without the need to install third party plug-ins, like Flash. But just which video format HTML5 video would work with has been up for debate for a while now, with H.264 being the obvious choice (as it is the ones most used with Flash based videos today, and also an industry standard), but also the valid argument that the royalty and patent encumbered H.264 format isn't ideal, especially since some of today's most popular browsers are the open source variety. Mozilla, in particular, was strongly objected to H.264 support being made mandatory for HTML5 browsers. Google, sensing an opportunity, stepped up and produced the VP8 based WebM format. But the format failed to gain any traction, and so this week, Mozilla has had to do the unthinkable: start supporting H.264.

Mozilla made the announcement this week that they would have to now offer H.264 support, especially for their mobile based products, as they see no other way forward without supporting a format that's even more entrenched in the mobile market than on desktop/standalones. While Mozilla would not be providing a built-in decoder, they would allow their Firefox browser to use existing software and hardware capabilities to decode H.264.

In my opinion, this was always going to be the likely outcome. Google's half-hearted support for WebM, some say hypocritically considering their Android platform offers H.264 decoding as standard, was never going to be enough to out-muscle H.264, especially since none of the major hardware makers were even interested to offer WebM support. And with Apple firmly behind H.264, and everyone else trying to out-Apple Apple, WebM had little or no chance to succeed.

So what does this mean for the average user? It means that HTML5 video now has a greater chance to succeed and become a true replacement for Flash, and that's probably a tick in the win column for everyone, even if this is a set-back for open-source video standards. MPEG LA, the licensing authority for H.264, for what it's worth, has promised not to charge royalties for this type of H.264 usage for the foreseeable future, so H.264 is free for the time being without being "free", if you know what I mean.

And finally, a story that feels a bit "PR-ish" to me, where Sony's DVD disc art for their remake of "The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo" is confusing people into thinking they've been sold a pirated copy of the movie. The disc art resembles a home made Sony DVD-R with the title of the film printed on to make it look like it was written on with black markers, and it's supposed to be a reference to the main character of the film, Lisbeth Salander, and her hacking ways. Those that purchased the Blu-ray+DVD combo version might be even more confused, since the Blu-ray disc art is fairly traditional, which makes the "DVD-R" stand out even more.

But a closer look reveals the MPAA rating, region info, and even some copyright text on the supposed home made "DVD-R". And the "DVD-R" being a Sony branded one, of course alludes to the fact that they were the studio behind the movie. So would it really have fooled people into calling up Redbox or whoever to complain, as was claimed by some of the news articles? Maybe a surprise at first, sure, but to be completely fooled? I don't think so. All has happened though is that this story has given the DVD set some free publicity, which is why I'm cynically leaning towards PR campaign on this one.

Alrighty then, that's pretty much the week as I remember it. Must get back to my "move" in Skyrim, still got 90+ each of dragon bones and scales to move, as well as my assortment of 400 iron daggers. This could take a while … see you next week.

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

March 25, 2012	ProgDVB 6.84.1 Freeware
March 25, 2012	XBMC media center 11.0 Freeware
March 25, 2012	LameXP 4.04 Beta 8 Freeware
March 25, 2012	WinFF 1.4.2 Freeware
March 25, 2012	MeGUI 2122 dev Freeware
March 24, 2012	SMPlayer 0.7.1.4173 unstable Freeware
March 24, 2012	KMPlayer 3.2.0.17 Freeware
March 24, 2012	Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 5.2 Freeware
March 24, 2012	Codec Tweak Tool 5.3.0 Freeware
March 24, 2012	NextPVR 2.4.3 Freeware
March 24, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 64-Bit 6.1.0 Freeware
March 24, 2012	K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 8.6.0 Freeware
March 24, 2012	K-Lite Codec Pack 8.6.0 Freeware
March 24, 2012	Windows 7 Codec Pack 4.0.2 Freeware
March 24, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.32772 Beta Freeware
March 23, 2012	Mac Blu-ray Player 1.16.0
March 23, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.5.8 Freeware
March 23, 2012	Windows 8 Codecs 1.0.5 Freeware
March 23, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.5.8 Freeware
March 23, 2012	ffdshow Rev. 4399 (generic/x64) Freeware
March 23, 2012	Freemake Video Converter 3.0.2.3 Freeware
March 22, 2012	GoldWave 5.67
March 22, 2012	eXtreme Movie Manager 7.2.2.4
March 22, 2012	PS3 Media Server 1.52.0 Freeware
March 21, 2012	VobSub/DirectVobSub/VSFilter 2.40.4162 Freeware
March 21, 2012	BurnAware Free Edition 4.8 Beta 2 Freeware
March 21, 2012	ClipWrap 2.4.8
March 21, 2012	Smart Cutter Ps/Ts 1.4.7
March 21, 2012	Miro 5.0 RC1 Freeware
March 20, 2012	SolveigMM Video Splitter 3.0.1203.19
March 20, 2012	BDtoAVCHD 1.7.5 Freeware
March 19, 2012	VideoLAN (VLC) 2.0.1 Freeware
March 19, 2012	Media Player Classic HomeCinema Edition 1.6.1.4157 Beta Freeware
March 19, 2012	MCEBuddy 2.1 Release 5 Freeware
March 19, 2012	EMDB 1.45 Freeware
March 19, 2012	Subtitle Edit 3.2.5 Freeware

DIGITAL DIGEST  | LiveUpdate Newsletter - Issue 296

1 April, 2012

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

INDEX:

1. Introduction

2. Weekly News Roundup

3. Weekly Software Roundup

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

1. Introduction

• ImgBurn 

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

2. Weekly News Roundup

I know what the date is, and no, I'm not going do something for it. The expectation is always too high, and I can never live up to it. Besides, all the interesting ones have been done, and the rest, I'm fairly sure, constitute libel. So nobody is making a fool out of anyone else for this year, not Digital Digest anyway.

Or maybe I'm just luring you into a false sense of security …

But before we get into any April based tomfoolery, which may or may not happen, let's get through the news roundup first.

But before that even, a linky link to Digital Digest's "new" Facebook page, or rather, the same page with the new Timeline thingy on it that has been forced upon all of us by all knowing Facebook. The timeline feature is definitely quite interesting, and if I have the time, I might just start adding a few of Digital Digest's milestones into the timeline (having only added in one entry for the launch of the website back in 1999, so far). I've never been a big fan of Facebook's user interface, but I must say this timeline thing does look good.

First, a follow-up to a story from last week regarding RapidShare. I mentioned last week, in a brief sentence, that RapidShare may soon be forced to filter all user uploads due to a recent court decision. Apparently, this is not actually  the case at all.

What had happened is that the groups suing RapidShare in Germany, a collection of book and music rights groups, had released a statement celebrating their "victory", despite the court having not yet released the full written verdict. But now that the written verdict has been released, it paints a rather different picture, one that RapidShare says gives them an important victory as well.

Now I'm aware of the spin that is probably being produced by both sides, but it's clear the the verdict wasn't the clear victory the rights holders had hoped for. What the court did, at least according to RapidShare, was to recognise RapidShare's overall business model as a legal one, while at the same time asking RapidShare to do more on the issues of copyright infringement. The court says that RapidShare needs to actively seek out links to infringing content (hosted on its servers) by visiting the common haunts for these types of things – popular forums, blogs, websites and such, and remove said content once it is aware of the likely legal status of the upload. This is opposed to scanning each and every download, without knowing anything about the legality of the download (which, according to the European Court of Justice, may constitute a violation of privacy rights). But RapidShare says they're already doing exactly this, and so for them, the court's verdict won't actually affect them too much. Despite this, RapidShare still plan to appeal the decision on the grounds that while they think these measures are a reasonable part of their business strategy, they don't believe the court has the right to order websites to comply.

Another file sharing host is taking a different approach to anti-piracy, although it might be too late, if not too little. A press release alerted me to the fact that Hotfile will start using Vobile's vCloud9 scanning solution to scan uploads for infringing content. Apparently, the technology employs a database of known file "fingerprints", and can even scan compressed archives to see if the upload contains infringing content. This comes after the company recently changed its affiliate program to no longer pay based on download volume (ie. heavily favoured towards pirated downloads), but instead, when uploads result in the downloader signing up to a premium account, and uploaders get a commission on that. With the MPAA still insistent on a summary judgement against Hotfile in its lawsuit, this may all be too late, and it's probably too little as well when it comes to what the MPAA really wants (which is to shut down Hotfile and make an example out of them, probably).

For those that take an interest in things like DVD and Blu-ray copy protection, as well as region coding and stuff, you should be well aware that Fox are one of the "hard-asses" when it comes to these sort of things. Being pretty much the only studio that consistently makes its US Blu-rays region locked (even Sony has seen the light, and forgoes region control for catalogue releases), and having early on declared their support for Blu-ray based solely on the format's preference for tougher copy protection methods (all of which has since been cracked, of course), you'd expect that Fox, and its parent company, to be the last one to have a copyright scandal. Which was why it was very ironical to see News Corp embroiled in its own piracy scandal this week, as claims were made by BBC's Panorama program, and also separately by an Australian newspaper, that a (former) subsidiary of News Corp may have helped to fuel piracy of competitor's services in order to gain an unfair market advantage. Apparently, the subsidiary, NDS, helped to crack rival pay TV networks' encryption cards, and then helped to ensure the cracked codes got into the hands of people who sell pirated services. News Corp, and NDS, have both denied these allegations, but both the BBC and the Australian paper, the Australian Financial Review, say they have gathered a lot of evidence on this (with the AFR saying that this investigation has been four years in the making). With the Australian government already considering launching its own official investigation into this incident, this could be a story to watch out for.

And finally for this week's copyright section, I have a story that hits pretty close to home. Actually, it hits directly at home like a guided missile, and for the fun of it, takes out a few neighbouring properties too.  This week, the home page of Digital Digest, and two PowerDVD related pages, were removed from the Google search results due to a DMCA take-down request filed by Guardlex.com. You can read the full story here, and the DMCA notice here on Chilling Effects if/when it's ever made available, but the gist of it is that Guardlex, probably working on behalf of Cyberlink (the makers of PowerDVD) to take down results related to pirated downloads of PowerDVD, took down our pages as part of a DMCA notice that included thousands of other URLs. The thousands of URLs also included well known legitimate websites such as Cnet's download.com, Afterdawn, Softonic.com and other clearly legal URLs, including a dozen URLs from Cyberlink's own website (including their home page!).

The whole DMCA removal process with Google goes something like this. When Google receives a DMCA notice, and if the notice has all the proper documentations, they immediately remove the URL from their search results (and you'll see the "In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed …" message at the bottom of any search results page that has removed results – do a search for "PowerDVD" right now, and you'll see 3 such messages, meaning 3 URLs were removed). Some time later, could be days or weeks, Google informs the owner of the removed page(s), assuming they have a webmaster central account with Google, of the take-down. And a few days after that, Google may send the website owner the actual DMCA notice. You then have the option to file a counter-notification, and if Google does not receive any further notice on this matter within 14 working days, the URLs get reinstated back into Google's index.

So even in the case of a mistaken identity, as was the case here I believe, it may take weeks to get it all sorted, with financial and a reputation loss that cannot be avoided. Under the DMCA, if I'm the victim of a mistaken take-down, I can sue for damages. The problem is that this is rarely worth the time and trouble when you factor in legal fees, and so DMCA agents can get away with these innocent and sometimes not so innocent mistakes, most of the time. This is probably why 57% of all DMCA claims made to Google are by companies out to "get" their competitors, and that 37% aren't even valid claims. It's clear that the DMCA is currently being abused by rights holders, and that was always going to happen if you have the level of bias present in these sets of laws.

And so it scares me very much to think that rights holders still say the DMCA is not biased enough, and they want something like SOPA or PIPA to make it even easier to take down entire websites, just for a few bad pages that may not even be bad. Sure, the major backers of the bills will say it's only for "foreign rogue" websites, and that they will promise not to abuse it, but can you really trust them? And even if you can, can you trust all the people and companies that will have access to SOPA/PIPA, to not abuse it in the same way they're currently abusing the DMCA?

A couple of WNR's ago, for an issue where I ran out of stuff to write, I enthused about how great streaming video-on-demand was, and how it look destined to be the future of home video.

It seems that the future is going to get here sooner than I though. The latest research via IHS Screen Digest (no relations) says that streaming has just overtaken discs as *the* way to watch movies and TV shows at home, having increased by about 140% in the last year alone. 3.4 billion viewings were made on streaming media, compared to only 2.4 billion on DVDs and Blu-ray, for 2011.

What was more interesting is that, on average, people only paid 51 cents for each streaming title, while they paid $4.72 for discs. The cost of an Internet connection and bandwidth is probably not counted for streaming, which will increase the cost, but I think the main idea is that people watch more on streaming, especially unlimited streaming offers, because they have access to more content for a far lower price than compared to "owning" content.

Of course, this story has led to people saying the end of nigh for Blu-ray, but until true Blu-ray quality 1080p can be streamed to most people's homes, the reality is that Blu-ray is still very much needed.

But for those that don't really care that much about seeing a few extra pixels or "owning" content, or for content that can't benefit from the full bandwidth HD treatment, then $7.99 per month for Netflix may be a much better deal than having a collection of hundreds or even thousands of discs (just making available the shelving space is a pain, trust me).

But for me, having something physical to hold on to that won't refuse to play simply because my Internet connection is down, is still worth the extra $4.21.

And with that, we come to the end of another WNR. See you next week.

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April 1, 2012	MCEBuddy 2.1 Release 6 Freeware
April 1, 2012	PlayOn 3.5.0.3074
March 31, 2012	MKV Chapterizer 2.3 Freeware
March 31, 2012	SMPlayer 0.7.1.4233 unstable Freeware
March 31, 2012	Lightworks 10.0.4.2 Beta Freeware
March 31, 2012	LameXP 4.04 Beta 11 Freeware
March 30, 2012	DVD PixPlay 7.05
March 30, 2012	PotPlayer 1.5.32852 Beta Freeware
March 30, 2012	IsoBuster 3.0
March 30, 2012	LAV Filters 0.50.1 Freeware
March 30, 2012	Simple x264 Launcher 2012-03-29 Freeware
March 30, 2012	ImgBurn 2.5.7.0 Freeware
March 29, 2012	BurnAware Free Edition 4.8 Freeware
March 29, 2012	Subtitle Edit 3.2.6 Freeware
March 29, 2012	Tribler 5.5.24 Freeware
March 29, 2012	Replay Media Catcher 4.4.0
March 28, 2012	Vista Codec x64 Components 3.5.9 Freeware
March 28, 2012	Windows 8 Codecs 1.0.6 Freeware
March 28, 2012	Windows 7 Codecs 3.5.9 Freeware
March 28, 2012	VideoCacheView 2.15 Freeware
March 27, 2012	KMPlayer 3.2 Build 19 Freeware
March 26, 2012	Collectorz.com Movie Collector For Mac OS X 8.0 build 7
March 26, 2012	MLC Lossless Codec 1.11 Freeware