DIGITAL DIGEST - http://www.digital-digest.com
DIGITAL DIGEST - LIVE UPDATE Issue 24
Your "whenever I have time to write one" newsletter
Saturday, 10th March, 2001
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TOP NEWS SUMMARY :
0. Section Zer0 - An Introduction to this Issue
1. OpenDivX - the Future is Here ... Part Deux
3. MIT Students Write 7-line CSS Cracking Source Code
4. Digital Fun and Games, and DVD Pet Hates
5. New Programs at Digital Digest
6. How to Cancel/Change Your
Subscription Email Address/Settings
- how to maintain the subscription to this newsletter even if your email address
has changed
7. A Simple Thank-you
- a thank-you message for all those that joined this list
Welcome to this, the 24th issue, of the Digital Digest LiveUpdate newsletter. Well 2001 looks like to be an interesting year. The world economic climate looks decisively bleak, and the IT world is not plagued, everyday, with more job cuts and closures of major online business.
Apart from blaming the stock market for over inflating IT share prices, I guess we also have ourselves to blame - we have gotten so used to the Internet being a "cost-free" environment with free email, free ISP and even free software. In actual fact, these free services and products actually costs quite a lot to maintain. But when these businesses turn to a pay-per-use model, there will always be an start-up somewhere that will give out the same service for free, and so you'll have to increase services, at the expensive of profit - hence making it almost impossible to have some sort of profitable business online.
Will the future of Digital Digest be secure - perhaps so, perhaps not - I guess in the end, it all depends on you, our valued visitors. With your continued interest and support, I would say the future of Digital Digest looks solid, but as competition heats up, and running cost increases, it is harder and harder to maintain a good level of service - so if our website loads slower, our downloads not as fast as before, please bear with us, and offer us a kind word of here and then - it won't pay the bills, but it will help.
Here's to hoping the Internet does not die ...
1. OpenDivX - the Future is Here ... Part Deux
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Just a couple of days/weeks after our
last story on the development of the open-sourced MPEG-4 DivX codec, the OpenDivX
initiative, the guys at Project Mayo have released a new version of
their codec, designed for the Windows environment, and the result already
looks good.
Although the codec is still extremely in-efficient (remembering that these guys are starting from scratch, and working for free), requiring a Pentium-III to get acceptable performance, the quality of the codec (if you ignore the bugs that may happen) is actually quite good - better than the original DivX codec in some cases. With more and more support for this codec, it looks like an efficient-bug-free version will soon be released, and once this happens, the future of DivX, as a universal ultra-compressive format, will be solid. So for now, why don't you grab a copy of this latest codec (called DivX4Windows), try it for yourself, and if you know a little bit about programming, have a look at the source code, and perhaps you can find a way to speed up the development of the codec. Download links for DivX4Windows here : http://www.divx-digest.com/software/opendivx.html or |
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Shortly after the change of
government in the US, the US Department of
Justice (DoJ), infamous for their fight against big businesses, like Microsoft,
have done a complete turn-around and has publicly offered support for the MPAA,
which in our opinion, is the largest and most profitable monopoly in the
United States.
"Despite defendants' efforts to pitch this case as a classic story of the gadfly press and to cast themselves in the role of the protagonist reporter who seeks only to convey truthful information to the pubic, this lawsuit is really about computer hackers and the tools of digital piracy," U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote in a brief that was filed after the federal government expressed interest in becoming an intervenor in the case, seeking a more "hands-on" role in this controversial case. The issue, in our opinion, is not about piracy, hacking but about the ability of the MPAA and the multi-billion dollar DVD industry to keep their stranglehold on the very profitable DVD monopoly. By keeping CSS, the MPAA/DVD industry are free to charge DVD manufacturers excessive fees (of up to and beyond $USD 1,000,000) for the purchase of a CSS license, which we now all know is useless in preventing digital copying of DVDs. Still, they are permitted to charge these fees for something that obviously doesn't work. The whole point here is not about piracy, but about monopoly, and how the MPAA/DVD industry can get profits for every DVD hardware or software sold anywhere in the world, through the CSS licensing scheme. And not the US federal government want to get in on the action too, it seems. So every time you purchase a new DVD movie in the US, or elsewhere, or whenever you purchase a DVD player, DVD-ROM drive or a DVD decoder software/hardware, be comforted by the fact that a good percentage of the money you just paid will be going towards the fight to keep you from using your purchase hardware/software to the full extent of their abilities, and the fact that what you have just bought, according to the MPAA, doesn't even belong to you. For more news on the DoJ decision, please refer to this article : http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2689144,00.html |
3. MIT Students Write 7-line CSS Cracking Source Code
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THE CODE :
#!/usr/bin/perl -w # 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz # MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin - descrambled output on stdout # arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order $_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=( $m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16 -2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h =5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$ d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d8^($f=$t&($d12^$d4^ $d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e8^($t&($g=($q=$e14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^ (($h=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval |
In a related
news, two MIT students have written a 7-line (not including header +
comments) Perl code that allows you remove the almost non-existent copy
"protection" on DVD files.
"I think there's some value in demonstrating how simple these things really are and how preposterous it is to try to restrict their distribution," says Winstein, a 19-year-old MIT sophomore computer science major. The code, for those that are interested, are on your left. Basically, DVD manufacturers are required to pay a handsome sum of about $USD 1,000,000 (I think) for a CSS license key which will allow them to manufacturer goods compatible with the DVD format - that makes the above code worth about $USD 1900 per character (not including header information, which is optional for an additional $USD 317,490). In the end, all the cost will be handed down unto us, the consumers, so the next time you wonder why DVD prices are so high, you'll know who to blame. |
4. Digital Fun and Games, and DVD Pet Hates
We have just started a new fun and games section within Digital Digest, for those who need some rest from all the DVD/DivX playing, ripping, conversion, encoding and authoring they have been doing.
Currently, the section is still pretty lame, as it only features some link to some DVD/DivX/Digital/Movie related polls, comics, jokes and some online games to relief the tension - more content will be added as time goes by. For example, we've just added a poll which ask you what you hate most about the DVD format (eg. CSS, Macrovision, Regions ...). There are also some excellent The Boondocks comic strips that makes fun at the current DeCSS lawsuits.
Start the fun here :
http://www.digital-digest.com/fun/index.html
5. New Programs at Digital Digest
DivX Software :Audio : Namp Normalize 0.232
Bitrate Calculators : Advanced DivX Calculator 1.6 Bitratex DivX Birate CalcIT DivXCalc 0.1.0.5 DivX Pro 1.0 Ecuador's AVI Bitrate Calculator 2.0 Release 2 Tony Savon's BitCalc 0.1 VOB2MPEG4 Calculator 1.05.00
Codecs : 3ivx MPEG-4 Codec 1.0d2 DivX4Windows 4.0 Alpha 48 Kristal Studio DivX Codec 4.3.3 Microsoft MPEG-4 VKI Codec 4.1.00.3920 SMR Codec 4.1.00.3920
Conversion : AVI2VCD 1.3.9 AVI2VCD / AVI Audio Decompressor 1.3.9 bbMPEG 1.24 b17aand AVI2MPG2 1.24 b13 DVD2AVI 1.59 M4C / IceM4C / idM4C MPEG2AVI PX3 0.1.0 SoftEngine 2.0
Cut/join : ASF Cut AVI Revolution 2.2
Editing : AVI Mux 0.4 AVIsynth 1.0 b31 + Plugin 0.28 b37 AVIUtl 0.96i DivFix 1.04
GUIs : Fast DivX 1.0d m4c GUI 0.3 WM8Enc GUI Beta1 WM8 Encoder GUI 1.0.9.5 Windows Media V8 encoding utility Frontend 0.2 beta
Launchers : DivX The Launcher 1.0 (English) ; 2.1 Beta 2 (French) Figgy's Simple DivX Launcher 1.1 Full-Moon Launcher 4.0 MDVD Go! 1.0.3 MediaLauncher 0.05 MediaLauncher Creator 0.01 MicroDVD Autorun 1.75 Movie Launcher Plus 1.11
Players : Ar1z Video Player 2.75 BS Player 0.827 MediaBox 1.0.4b Mediastation 0.04 RadLight Player 3.02 Ripnot Player 3.00 Sasami2k 640B Twins Video Player 1.0
Rip-Packs : BH's DivX Rippack DVD Killer 2.4 DVD:Reaper 2.52 DVD-RIPP 3.95 EasyEncode 0.5 alpha 2 FairUse Wizard 0.25 Beta G-Ripp 0.4 MPEG2AVI Rip Pack 2.2
Subtitle tools : MicroDVD Hebrew Fix 1.1 SSA to SubRipper Converter 0.05b SubRip 0.93b SubtitleFix 2.0 Subtool 2.2
DVD Software :
Audio : AZID 1.0.6.490 DSEnc 1.2 Beta 4
Authoring : DVDauthorQUICK 2.05D DVD Wise 1.74 SimpleDVD
Conversion : DVMPEG 5.07 FlasK MPEG 0.6 Preview Flask MPEG Multi-pass Flask MPEG PX3 CSS Flask MPEG SubtitleFix v6 Flask MPEG Tsunami v6 Flask MPEG Vulture LSX-MPEG Suite 2.0 Mac MPEG2Dec 1.0b5r2 MegaPEG 1.5 PixelTools TMPGEnc beta 12d WinVCR 2.0
GUIs : AZZA-GUI 1.00 Danni Din's MPEG2AVI/AC3DEC/VSTRIP GUI 0.20g
Mac tools: mAC3dec 1.0.1 Mac MPEG2Dec 1.0b5r2
Playback : DVD Station Plus 1.2 Eugene's DVD player 0.96.1 Beta ShowShifter 1.00.258 Zoom Player 1.30
Playback tools : More PowerDVD Skins
Region : DVD Genie 3.85 Region-free Firmwares
Ripping : All ripping tools are now hosted by our partner site, RipHelp. Please refer to them for the latest versions.
Other : DirectX Control Panel Applet 4.08.00.0400 DVD Expert 1.21 Movie-Box Database 1.21 Movie Collection Tracker 1.0 Movie Manger 2001 NanoDVR NewsReactor 1.0 Build 3916 WinCRC 1.0
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Thank-you
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