Just popping back up for a minute - it's been a very busy week. Unlike in the past they really made us work this time round..

It hasn't been a good week for big content: their first trial against a BitTorrent site tracker (OiNK) in the UK resulted in a not guilty verdict, the French authority in charge of disconnecting people from the Internet for copyright infringement has been found guilty of copyright infringement themselves and the online music price fixing case against the RIAA label has been reinstated.

And, after all the crying about losing money to piracy, guess what happened - revenue from movie theaters is up 10% in 2009 over 2008 despite the financial crisis. So, dare I ask if we really need to have three strikes, laws against camcording, etc. if people still spend their hard earned dollar on movie tickets despite the latest CAM release never being too far away?

Remember the HD-DVD/DVD combo discs? Well, they're back, almost... instead of the now defunct HD-DVD side they simply sport a Blu-ray side.

SMPlayer 0.6.8.3430 bundles the latest SVN release of SMPlayer with the latest multithreaded build of mplayer.

ProgDVB 6.31.1 uses the NIT information in the channel scanner.

As announced, I have to leave again for a bit today - if time allows I might post some news in the forum during the week or just updated the page on the weekends when I'll hopefully be able to go home.

In the meantime, finally for once I can write about a band I've actually seen live - in a move that will undoubtedly displease the recording industry, Swedish band Rednex is releasing their latest single not through traditional, industry approved, but instead through fan approved means: The Pirate Bay. And to further aggravate the matter, their take on where the music industry is headed is certainly not in the line of Big Content ;)

And I know it's repetitive, but we need to keep calling them on their shenanigans - so while Rupert Murdoch has recently gone on a crusade against content aggregators and dissed Fair Use, now that his Fox News network is being sued for copyright infringement, suddenly the defense is that mockery of a concept called Fair Use...

ProgDVB 6.30.3 contains a reworked time correction mechanism for EPG, allows recording of subtitles in TS format and fixes crashes that occurred when using the mouse wheel.

DGNVDec build 2001 moves field operation options from DGIndexNVto DGDecodeNV/DGMultiDecodeNV, fixes backward steeping by GOP for program streams, fixes lockups when serving MKV files and navigating near the end of the file, contains some performance improvements and an up-to-date documentation.

Finally, I could start listing all the new gadgets announced at CES last week, but let's sum it up in one sentence (at least as far as Blu-ray is concerned): profile 2.0 seems to be the standard now, players are booting up faster than ever, most players get some kind of Internet connectivity used to stream a variety of content, and then there's 3D.

Happy New Year. It took me a little longer to get back on the horse than I anticipated, and I have to leave again for 3 weeks shortly, but after that I should be around a lot more.

So let's recap what has happened in 2010 so far, hopefully in chronological order:

First of all, France's three strikes law went into effect - that is, almost: Unless the national privacy watchdog signs off, the party at RIAA/MPAA central cannot start.

DGDecNV build 2000 fixes random access for MPEG-2 program streams and fixes reversed fields in the info dialog.

Then we have the beta test of a new input method for x264 - the new input method allows to open almost any file without AviSynth and can handle variable framerate content without timecode file.

Haven't we hard that being called managed copy before? Just before CES opens its door, the MPAA members have come up with yet another layer of DRM - the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE, should allows us to play content on any device. That is, as long as it remains wrapped in DRM and each device has to get authorization from the mothership to be played. Now why does that remind me of DIVX? By the way, Disney is not on board - they have their own little DRM party called KeyChest.

BD Rebuilder 0.31.06 now uses B-frames for the high speed option, changes the default CRF values to approximate quality on extras, updates to the latest build of x264 and fixes some bugs.

DivX hasn't been on top of things for quite a bit now - the advent of cheap, AVC capable hardware came before they were ready for it. Now they're trying to get back on top with DivX TV.

Finally, plans for 3D Blu-ray have already been announced but here's the logo for it, and after adding support for BD-Live, online video sources, LG is also adding harddisks to their latest Blu-ray player lineup. Will players soon dub as a small NAS?

Older news can be found here.

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