You've probably heard that the new HD-DVD format, which was reportedly un-crackable, has been hacked. Last week the anonymous hacker that goes by the name of muslix64 was interviewed by Slyck.com
This was an extremely interesting interview with muslix64 who sounded like a modest and intelligent character that was more interested in fair rights for the consumer than promoting piracy.
The reason that muslix64 started hacking the HD DVD protection was because he wasn't able to appropriately play back a HD DVD film that he purchased on a non-HDCP HD monitor.
Interestingly muslix64 also described that the hacking that DVD Jon did to crack the protection on DVDs some years ago, was actually technically more difficult than what he himself did with HD DVD.
If you'd rather watch TV in the bathroom than read the paper, you might as well go all out, right? Roto Rooter is sponsoring a contest for a "Pimped out John." The winner will get a flat screen HDTV, laptop computer, an iPod with a dock, a TiVo, an Xbox 360, and a DVD player, portable fridge, and other components to make sure you never have to leave your favorite room in the house. Oh yeah, and there's a Kohler toilet thrown in for good measure.
The contest begins January 24th, it's not clear at this point what you have to do to win, but Roto Rooter is encouraging people to sign up for the company's newsletter "to be reminded when the sweepstakes begins."
You know, when we first heard rumors that Netflix was going to offer video downloads, possibly even partnering with TiVo, it sounded pretty exciting. But that was in 2005.
Now everybody and his grandmother has a video download store. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, AOL etc. Still, Netflix has been an innovator in movie delivery and product recommendations, so when I heard today that they would be launching a limited trial of their service, I was still excited.
And then I found out that the company has a DVD catalog of over 70,000 titles, and what are they making available online? Older movies that don't get rented very often, like Amadeus, Chinatown, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. That's right, Netflix is competing with basic cable here. All told, about a thousand movies should be available online at launch, so I'm hoping there's some better ones in the mix somewhere.
So first TiVo goes and outsources TiVoToGo for Mac to Roxio, and then Roxio leaves out one of the promised features, a TiVo theme on DVDs you burn from TiVoToGo recordings.
Well, it turns out that since TiVoToGo is built into Toast Titanium 8, and since Roxio figures that a fairly small number of Toast users will really be using the TiVo functions, they left the TiVo theme out of the official release. That seems a bit silly. Why bother building TiVoToGo functions into your product and then leave out a theme that only takes up a few megabytes?
Anyway, Dave Zatz posts a link to download the TiVo theme. All you have to do is download the file, unzip it, save tivo.psd to the Toast DVD Menu Styles folder, and you're done. Zatz also points out that since the file is a psd file, you could probably use Photoshop to edit the theme to your liking
Earlier this month I reported that HD DVDs had been sort of cracked. By "sort of cracked" I mean you could backup/copy a HD DVD providing you had access to the hard-coded "Volume Unique Keys", but how you would get hold of these keys was pretty much unknown.
However, now members of the Doom9 forum have tracked down the elusive key in memory and have already started leaking keys for a few HD titles including Serenity, King Kong and 12 Monkeys.
The cracking battle is not over yet due to a little part of the HD DVD protection system called Key Revocation. Key revocation procedures ensure that devices manufactured by any vendors who violate the license agreement could be relatively easily blocked from receiving HD data.
At this point it's not very clear what this will mean in reality and how it will effect HD DVD players and their users, some playback issues with the ripped HD movies have already been reported.
Another product out of CES this week is the Vault 360 media converter from Bamboo Technology that acts as a central hub for your media, allowing you to manage and convert your media collection so it is ready for playback on a variety of devices.
Rather than using a whole suite of software to convert various formats into other various formats, Vault 360 will handle it all.
When it comes to video Vault 360 can convert video files such as AVI, DivX, MPEG, WMV, etc to DVD format and other formats ready for playback on portable devices. It can also import and convert video from DVDs, camcorders, video recorders such as TiVo, Media Center PCs, DVRs and even from VCDs and VHS
Vault 360 supports "virtually any portable device" converting video files into the correct format. It already supports a number of specific products and Bamboo will also add support for new devices as they come out. Vault 360 also contains a built in scripting language that allows others to add support for more media devices.
Zoran is working on a new OEM portable media player designed to work with CinemaNow and other movie download services. I believe this is the first PMP designed to work with CinemaNow. While the company's been around longer than Apple's been selling videos through iTunes, it'll be tough for anyone to compete with Apple when it comes to selling videos that you can download and sync to a portable player.
MSI Media Live is showcasing a new Media Center PC featuring AMD64 dual-core processors, a 12-in-1 card reader, and support for AMD LIVE!, HDMI, and NVIDIA PureVideo, among other buzzwords.
Hard disk and DVD recorder hybrids are a popular personal recording solution since it gives people the easy option of keeping recordings on their TiVo and burning those extra special recordings to DVD to keep permanently.
When it comes to PVRs TiVo is definitely a very popular solution yet we haven't seen a new TiVo/DVD recorder hybrid for a good few years. Currently the models available are the:
Pioneer DVR-810H - 80-hour TiVo
Toshiba RS-TX20 - 140-hour TiVo
Humax DRT800 - 80-hour TiVo
In the UK the Sony RDR-HXD860 hybrid hard disk and DVD recorder (which is not a TiVo) appeared to be one of the best selling PVRs this Christmas and I'm sure there must be a high demand for a new high capacity Series 2 or Series 3 hybrid TiVo in the US.
With the new Blu-ray and HD DVD discs hitting the market we could even possibly see a new TiVo hybrid recorder that uses the Blu-ray or HD DVD format, although I'm not too sure the demand for these formats is high enough in the US at the moment.
If and when a new hybrid TiVo is announced we'll let you know...
Burning recorded video from a PVR to a DVD recorder is something that a lot of us want to do but unfortunately it is not always such an easy task. Here is a brief outline of some of the ways you can go about burning PVR recordings to a DVD:
Connect your PVR to your TV and DVD recorder using RCA composite cables, S-Video cables or the traditional coaxial cable. You can then, depending on the setup on your PVR: a) use the "record to VCR" feature on your PVR such as on a Sceintific Atlantic PVR. b) playback PVR recordings through your TV and then, while they play, record them from the TV to your DVD recorder.
Connect your PVR to a PC and export recordings from your PVR to your PC's hard drive. Different models of PVRs will have different PC software for the job and some won't have this functionality at all. If you have a TiVo the softare to use is TiVo2Go. Once the recording is on your PC you simply convert and burn the copied recordings from your PC and onto a DVD using a DVD writer and DVD burning software such as Nero. Dave Zatz shows you how to do it with a TiVo PVR and the Nero software. There are also some instructions on how to do this with a DirecTiVo.
No, I'm not giving away my personal video collection. But Giveaway of the Day is giving away a free copy of All My Movies, a video database program.
The program lets you grab information from the IMDB or other online databases for Russian, German, Dutch, French, Polish, Italian and Spanish films. You can then save that information in a personal database. You can also capture screenshots from DVD or AVI files and add them to the databse. Movie posters are pulled from sites like Amazon.
You can add videos using UPC codes, which you can type in or scan if you happen to have a bar code scanner. There's a search function, a loan manager to help you keep track of your videos, and the ability to export your database to an HTML, TXT, or XLS file. You can also export your data to a cell phone or PDA.
Sorry for the late notice about the deal, I just discovered it a few minutes ago. But the deal's still good for a few hours. The program regularly goes for $34.95, although there's a 25% discount if you buy before Christmas.
Posted Dec 20th 2006 10:19AM by Brad Linder Filed under: DVD
You ever happen across one of those blog posts that makes so much sense that you think, why didn't I write that first? Well Brian Watson does a great job of summing up why I never really watch DVDs anymore.
Before we got our first PVR, we had a Netflix subscription. But over the past 2-3 years, I could probably count on one hand that number of DVDs I've watched -- and that's including DVDs I own.
Here are some of the advantages a PVR has over a DVD player:
A PVR will save your place in as many programs as you want. As soon as you pop a disc out of a DVD player you've lost your place.
You can store as many movies as your hard drive will allow on a PVR, giving you a large library of videos to choose from.
You don't have to get up from the couch and take a DVD out of its case and load it in the player every time you want to watch a movie on a PVR.
You don't have to wait for a PVR to boot up or for a movie to go through an FBI warning screen before you can start watching.
DVD discs can get scratched up if you leave them lying about. I guess theoretically your hard drive could get damaged if you left it lying about... but what are the odds of that happening?
You don't have to pay for DVD purchases or rentals. Depending on what type of PVR you have, you may have had to pay a 1-time fee to set it up, or you may pay a monthly fee. And depending on how many movies you watch, this may be cheaper than renting DVDs.
Of course, there are a few advantages to DVDs:
Movies come out on DVD sooner than they do on cable, especially if you don't subscribe to premium channels.
DVDs don't take up any space on your hard drive, leaving room to record other shows.
Okay, here's a shocker... 79.2% of all American households have at least one VCR. This statistic jumped out at me far more than the headline of Nielsen's latest press release that "DVD Players Surpass VCRs."
I mean, it shouldn't be surprising. My parents are satellite subscribers. They have hundreds of channels at their fingertips. They have a 32" LCD HDTV. And they have a VCR. And they can't seem to figure out why hi-def programs they record on VHS don't look very good during playback. Old technologies die hard. Except for the 8-track.
Anyway, apparently DVD players have finally overtaken VCRs in US homes, with 81.2% of all households reporting that they have a DVD player. That's up 6% from last year.
Nielsen's been tracking DVD ownership since 1999, when only 6.7% of households reported owning one. 88.6% of households had a VCR at that point. So while DVDs have caught up over the last 7 years, it looks like a relatively small number of people are ready to throw out that VCR altogether, whether they use it or not.
So you've dropped $600 on a PS3 (or a few thousand dollars to pick one up on eBay), only to realize that you hate video games. Well, as it turns out you've not only picked up a Blu-Ray player for your living room, but you can also install Linux on it.
And once you can install Linux, you can do all sorts of things, like say, ripping Blu-Ray Movies. The folks over at the PS3News forums have managed to dump the data from a Blu-Ray copy of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. It takes up 20.9GB of space on the hard drive, so you'll need to get a 60GB PS3 or an external hard drive if you want to rip movies. And once you do it's up to you to figure out how to burn a copy. Or if you want a media center that can only hold a few movies at a time, then I guess you're all set.
Of course, if you've gone through all the trouble of installing Linux on your PS3 and ripping a hi-def movie, it probably wouldn't be that hard to compress it to DivX or XviD.
I've always maintained that the reason Napster was so popular when it was new is because it made it easier to download music than to rip your own CD collection.
Well, Wal-Mart seems to agree with that reasoning, and they're set to begin offering movie downloads -- for DVDs you've already purchased at a Wal-Mart store.
The service will roll out nationwide on Wednesday, starting with customers who purchase the DVD of Superman Returns. You'll be able to download the film in three different formats. A low-resolution version for portable devices will cost $1.97, while $2.97 will get you a PC version, and $3.97 will get you a bundle with versions formatted for both PCs and portable devices.
About 40 percent of all the DVDs sold in the US are currently sold through Wal-Mart stores. Wal-Mart says it will offer other DVD/digital download bundles, and also plans to launch a beta version of an online video store featuring movie and television content.
I think the bundle idea is interesting. While ripping a DVD for viewing on a PC or portable media player would be easy for tech-savvy consumers, I think a lot of people would find the idea of a digital download for just a few extra dollars appealing. On the other hand, this is kind of like asking you to pay again for something you've already purchased.
Linksys is entering the home video player market after having purchased consumer electronics company KiSS last year. The first product to bear Linksys's name is the DP1600 -- a networked DVD player that supports DiVX, XviD, WMV9, MP3, and MPEG 1/2/and 4 video files.
The DP1600 includes Scart, composite, S-Video, component, HDMI, optical and SPIDF connections, as well as an ethernet and 802.11 b/g wireless.
The DP1600 will also work as a media extender for Windows Vista Media Center. No price has been set, but the device should be available in December.
You've probably heard that the new HD-DVD format, which was reportedly un-crackable, has been hacked. Last week the anonymous hacker that goes by the name of muslix64 was interviewed by Slyck.com
Hard disk and DVD recorder hybrids are a popular personal recording solution since it gives people the easy option of keeping recordings on their TiVo and burning those extra special recordings to DVD to keep permanently.
Burning recorded video from a PVR to a DVD recorder is something that a lot of us want to do but unfortunately it is not always such an easy task. Here is a brief outline of some of the ways you can go about burning PVR recordings to a DVD:
