Author: Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?

EU/Microsoft Mediaplayer Decision Due Today

The EU’s National Antitrust Exports Advisory meets to day to give their decision on one of their longest running cases – Microsoft’s bundling of multimedia applications in their Windows operating system.

This is the first of an expected two meetings – Microsoft will probably be given a deadline today, and will be expected to provide a “lightweight” version of Windows without its bundled applications, making it easier for other software manufacturers to include their own multimedia players and browsers when conusmers purchase a new PC. We would be very surprised if MS Europe didn’t already have a “core OS and applications only” version of Windows ready to go. Since this case have been going on since Windows 95, they’ve had plenty of time as there have been at least five major versions released since then.

The current solution for MS, the “Set Program Access and Defaults” tool, included in the last service packs, was introduced as a result of legal action, but does not tackle the controversial issue of software bundling.

The second meeting will be on the 22nd of March, where we predict that Microsoft will get hit up for a couple of hundred million euros.

Of course, Microsoft will appeal against both measures, prolonging the case even further – but perhaps next year you’ll be able to buy a PC with RealPlayer instead of Windows Media as the default multimedia application.

The EU’s Antitrust Site

Watching Microsoft Like A Hawk

Motorola’s Linux Music Phone

Motorola haven’t released a Linux-based phone outside the Far East before – but their new E680 looks like it will be distributed in the West.

The phone is intended to be a wireless entertainment portal, with plenty of features to support that claim: GPRS downloads of up to 115kbps; MP3, RealPlayer and MPEG4 playback; stereo speakers; FM radio. And, yes, it has a camera – VGA with an 8x digital zoom and MPEG4 video capture.

The phone incorporates a WAP browser and will run J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition) applications. Further expansion is available through an SD slot, up to 1gb.

LinuxDevices on the new phone

Slashdot

BBCi Launches One-Minute Movies – “It’s not a competition.”

One Minute Movies is a new site from BBCi, and it’s designed to give everyone the chance to show their short film to the world.

The site gives the reason they’re doing it: “There are many websites about making films but we thought they were all a bit too serious, a bit too technical. The spirit behind One-Minute Movies is to just pick up a camera and shoot.”

With strong advice and tips on story, directing, sound and editing the site even has a small collection of classical music you can download and use for your own project. Tips come from professional film makers like David Lynch and Ann Coates and there’s also a facility for sending on your own tips and discussing them on the message board.

The rules are simple – basically it has to be all your own work and not break any laws. It doesn’t even need to be only a minute long.

We like this idea. Although the idea is not unique to the BBC, they are getting high profile exposure for what we feel will become a popular form of content, particularly on mobile devices.

They have made the smart move trying to ensure a certain degree of quality by providing lots of information about the process. The site concentrates on making films with the equipment lots of people would already have, without requiring any additional expense from software or hardware.

Although just about anyone could shoot a short film and host it themselves, having a movie on the BBC site will give it a much larger audience. Be aware though, as with all these things, submitting your film to BBCi gives them the right to do whatever they like with it, forever.

Making something only a minute long might seem simple, but it can be extremely challenging – and rewarding. Perhaps we’ll get round to finishing that stop-motion Lego film that nearly drove us insane at Christmas.

BBCi One Minute Movies

Brand Republic

The Magic Portal – sheer genius (requires DivX)

Nintendo Uses Patent to Crack Down on ROM Copying

There’s been some confusion in how this story is being reported, so we thought we’d go over the key points.

Nintendo’s patent applies to emulating ROM-based games consoles, such as the N64 and GBA in other systems. You’ll no doubt have seen this before when you’ve played Mario Kart on the way over to New York from London: obviously there aren’t a hundred SNES consoles behind the cargo hold (if there were, it might explain why they’re so pricey on eBay).

From the patent document: “A software emulator for emulating a handheld video game platform such as GAME BOY.RTM., GAME BOY COLOR.RTM. and/or GAME BOY ADVANCE.RTM. on a low-capability target platform (e.g., a seat-back display for airline or train use, a personal digital assistant, a cell phone).”

The patent can be used to prevent other people making commercial use of a similar system – such as Firestorm gbaZ, and that’s exactly what’s just happened. Nintendo contacted Kyle Poole, responsible for the emulator and demanded that he no longer promote, market, use or distribute the Firestorm gbaZ or pursuse any further emulation of any Nintendo system. Nintendo’s key is that “All of the software for Nintendo’s proprietary video game systems is distributed in a tangible medium, sold through retail outlets. None of the games are distributed in digital versions on the Internet. Any such distribution, or promotion of any such distribution, is illegal.”

Crimson Fire – home of the Tapwave Emulator

Slashdot on the affair

Pay As You Go Broadband

In answer to BT’s new UK£19.99 broadband product, capped at 1gb but “burstable”, Tiscali have launched a competing product aimed at customers wanting to dip their toes in broadband internet access.

Bandwidth is set at 512Kb/s and has an option of either 1Gb of data per month, or 50 hours online. Customers who go over their basic allowance either pay 2p per minute or 2p per Mb extra, depending whether they are on the 1Gb or 50 hour package.

The new packages that are appearing from suppliers look like good value at first, but we thought we’d check what you’re really getting. We dug out our HP48G+ and calculated that you could get nearly 10Gb down the pipe on the 50 hour package, but then it does limit you to less than two hours a day online. Further frightening calculations revealed that certain DigLif staff spend at least 120 hours a month online, and so for “heavy” users uncapped products currently retailing at UK£29.99 are best.

Tiscali’s Broadband Offerings

Gracenote CD Database Raises US$13 Million in Venture Capital Funding

A few years ago, it was just a convenient tool to show what tracks you were playing on your CD – but now Gracenote is an important tool for people who listen to music on their PC or iPod, whether they know it or not.

We can think of few tools which have gone from a nice feature to being absolutely essential – the rise of personal digital music players has made online CD databases absolutely essential if you want to rip your 1000+ collection of disks and still stay sane.

Many users of Gracenote don’t even know they’re accessing the service – most applicatons just nip off and download the data without them realising. More recent changes to Gracenote have meant that applications must be licensed to use the database, and must display the Gracenote logo when they access the service.

The company estimate that 150 million units of Gracenote-capable software were shipped in 2003, and that this will rise to 200 million in 2004.

Gracenote

FreeDB – an open source CD database

Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink, Yahoo Gang Up on Poor Defenseless Spammers

Only two months after the US can-spam act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing), Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink and Yahoo have taken legal action against at least a hundred of the individuals that have been clogging up your inbox with all those offers of loans, cheap medicines and naked men, women and livestock.

The can-spam act made many of the spammers techniques illegal – such as sending bulk email by the misuse of open proxies (basically a relay for sending mail), using false email addresses and false unsubscribe options.

The plaintiffs aren’t entirely sure who they are prosecuting – many of the defendants are as yet unnamed, but they’re confident they’ll know who they are by the time the cases get to court.

This is a tiny, tiny step in the progress towards reducing the amount of spam that is sent worldwide every day. This legal action from MS et al will do little to stop the vast tidal wave of spam from around the world – only when changes are made to email software and mail transmission can we look forward to seeing any reduction.

Microsoft’s Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative (CSRI)

BBC Q&A on Spam

Spam filters on ZDNet

Starbucks Offering Customised CDs

Always keen to develop the Starbucks experience, the Seattle-based coffee house has partnered with Hewlett-Packard to give customers an innovative music product – personalised CDs burned to order.

We’ve all seen services offering tailor-made CDs before, where this service is different is in the customer interface. This one uses HP tablet PCs (and thankfully, headphones) so that punters can chose can choose from 250,000 licensed tracks and have a CD or two made up for them from their selection.

This could finally be a success for custom CDs – many initiatives in the past have failed because customers don’t really like standing in front of a kiosk for half an hour choosing tracks from a limited selection. Lounging around in a well-worn sofa drinking coffee and picking favourites from a library of a quarter of a million tunes is much more appealing.

A further benefit will be that customers to Starbucks will get more exposure to legal downloads and may be tempted to try similar services such as iTunes when they get home.

The service will be available in selected US branches from 16th March – if any DigLif readers get a chance to try it out, please drop us an email and let us know how you found it.

Business Week

What Starbucks did next

Hand-held Digital Video Broadcasting – a summary of progress at DVB World 2004

The fourth Digital Video Broadcasting World conference was held in Dublin last week – and one of the key topics discussed was the developing standard for broadcasting digital video to hand-held and other mobile devices.

The new standard was only conceived two years ago, and after a couple of name changes (it has previously been known as DVB-M and DVB-X), has been named DVB-H. The standard was accepted by the DVB Technical Module in January and is expected to be submitted to the European Television Standards Institute this year.

As the standard is still so new, there are still some problems to be ironed out, mainly power consumption and some network issues.

DVB-H’s core function is the delivery of digital media to small and portable devices such as mobile phones, but without using mobile phone networks. It has been designed to deliver MPEG-2 streams, but can broadcast any type of data.

The proposed standard addresses five issues with mobile devices: they tend to move about, they have smaller screens, they have smaller antennas, they require indoor coverage and they run on battery power.

DVB-T (the terrestrial standard for digital broadcasting) was not really considered for mobile video as it was designed for use with rooftop antennas and does not have the building penetration required, nor is it very power efficient. In theory it could be used to broadcast to mobile devices but a separate dedicated standard would allow many optimisations, rather than just bolting on functionality to a standard that was never actually designed for mobile use.

DAB was designed for devices with similar location and power demands, but simply does not have the spectrum width to carry the data required.

Another interesting aspect of DVB-H is that it can coexist with DVB-T without disturbing devices using the other stream, such as set-top boxes.

DVB-H uses time-slicing between streams to reduce power consumption, but this saving is more or less lost when the total bit rate for a service is low. It’s designed to carry only IP (Internet Protocol) services, so is obviously constrained by the capabilities of the carrier protocol – but since IP is well understood and supported, and has a rich set of features such as strong encryption, this should not present many problems.

As we said at the beginning, the standard doesn’t use existing mobile networks to deliver content, but we should add that it also needs more masts than conventional broadcasting (though less than cellular coverage, and the masts need not be as large as conventional broadcast masts). It is expected that existing cellular masts will be upgraded to transmit DVB-H signals. However, the cellular network will provide the return path, allowing users to pay for content and receive licenses for their purchases.

Presented at DVB2004 was the Nokia’s 7700 is the first device to support DVB-H through the addition of their Streamer SU-6 accessory. The SU-6 is attached to the 7700 like a battery pack and is just the beginning for devices that will provide new forms of multimedia and entertainment for consumers.

DVB Home

The Nokia 7700

The European Television Standards Institute

Coming to a PVR Near You: Hitachi’s 400gb hard Drive

Snappily titled the Deskstar 7K400, the drive is currently under test by equipment manufacturers hoping to use it in their products, and could be incorporated into PVRs late in the year. The 400gb drive is available with a PATA or newer SATA interface and spins at 7200 rpm, pretty much the standard these days. The drive uses 3.5” platters, so won’t be suitable for mobile devices. Currently, the highest capacity 3.5” drive is around 250gb.

Hitachi hopes the drive will give it a bigger role in the consumer electronics market due to the rapid growth of PVRs, hard disk recorders and media hubs in the home. Last year Apple bought 730,000 units of hard disks from Hitachi’s competitor Toshiba, so obviously they’re keen to see some of that business in future.

400gb translates to about 400 hours of broadcast television, or about 45 hours of HDTV. Or nearly a year’s worth of MP3s.

Apple’s hard drive future