HomeWeekly News Roundup (February 18, 2018)
Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Valentine’s Day just passed, and one of three things might have happened. You might be single and it was simply just another day (or maybe you were at a gathering with like minded other singles), or you are in a relationship and had a nice celebration. Or you *were* in a relationship and now you’re no longer because you had totally forgotten about it. Ouch!
Incidentally, it was also the Chinese/Lunar New Year, so Happy year of the Dog to everyone.
Neither of these two holidays meant that the work of this site stopped, and so we do have news to cover this week. Yeah!
Crunchyroll vulnerability lets pirates enjoy free content
Sometimes it’s hard to find and share pirated content. Sometimes though, it’s quite easy, as streaming search engine StreamCR found out this week. StreamCR found a vulnerability in anime/manga streaming site Crunchyroll that allowed all of the subscription site’s content to be streamed for free. Apparently, all that was needed was an active subscription and a little bit of code hacking to extract the link to the stream.
I’m sure the vulnerability will be patched up soon, but piracy has never been easier!
This brings up a side issue that pretty much unrelated to this news story. Is it a good thing to have niche streaming platforms like Crunchyroll or Hayu that can cater for a specific taste in viewing, or is it better to have “all-in-one” platforms like Netflix that has a bit of everything. I guess it’s true that even if Netflix devoted a lot of time and resources to streaming anime, it probably wouldn’t do half as good a job as Crunchyroll, and that’s why niche streaming services like them exists. But on the other hand, it really is becoming a pain to have to subscribe to so many different services if you want to get a bit of everything, and that’s before Disney/Fox launches its own streaming service.
It’s all getting a bit fractured, and that’s not how I envisioned on-demand streaming (or at least it’s not how I wanted it to be) when it started to become mainstream. I’m still holding out for a single service that has everything, but I think that dream is looking less likely by the minute.
HDR support is now present in VLC 3.0
A new major version of VLC has been released and it adds a few very useful features. The addition of Chromecast support is much welcomed, which now allows you to stream local media files to the Chromecast, even if the media file is in a format not natively supported by Google’s streaming dongle. Chromecast support for VLC only work in Android (and on Chromebooks via the Play store app) at the moment, but with a unified codebase, it’s likely the same support will be coming to the other platforms.
Also added was HDR more, better hardware decoding support that makes 4K and 8K playback much more efficient (VLC has a demo showing 8K playback on the Samsung Galaxy S8), 10bit video support and even support for 360 degree videos with 3D audio.
And as always, VLC remains free and open source.
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That’s it for news this week. I know it’s not much, but believe me, this was the best of a bad lot. See you next week!