Digital-Lifestyles

Simon Perry

  • Blue-laser DVD recorder on sale in Japan

    Sony started selling the first blue-laser DVD recorder, the BDZ-S77, in Japan on 10 April at a cost of ¥450,000 ($3,760/£2,380).

    Conforming to the Blu-ray standard, it’s capable of recording two hours of high-definition video at maximum quality, or four hours of standard-definition digital broadcasting or up to 16 hours of lower quality analog terrestrial, all in MPEG-2 format.

    By using a blue laser, which has a shorter wavelength than the current red laser standard, it stores information more densely giving at least 23Gb on each disk (¥3,500/$30/£18), around five times the capacity of a standard DVD.

    As ever, there are going to be competing standards for HD DVD recordings, three others this time, but Sony is the first to release a product.

  • PS2 DVD update

    Sony is planning to release an upgraded version of the PlayStation2 in Japan on 15 May, increasing its DVD playback capability.

    A while back Sony released a DVD recorder that writes both of the major competing formats, DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW. Interestingly, the new PS2 will also support both of these, as well as the picture-enhancing “progressive scan” playback and a built-in IR port for the remote control.

    Combine these with the 75% reduction in fan noise and it looks like it’s becoming a better entertainment centre.

    Given the PS2 now has a broadband adaptor, this could/should open up the market for enhanced DVD’s that provide additional content depth via the Internet.

  • Apple May Buy Universal Music (Update:Hoax)

    Update: Some clever wags hoaxed this.

    Major, major, major news if it’s true. The LA Times and others are reporting that Apple computers have been in discussion with Universal for several months and plan to make a $6Bn offer to the Vivendi at their board meeting on 29 April. Universal accounts for about 1/4 of all CD sales and is the biggest player in 63 territories around the World. As The Register points out, there may be some complications as Apple reached an out-of-court agreement with Apple Corp. (the Beatles music label) not to enter in the music business in 1990.

    I was aware that Apple was working on a super secret project, so much so that people that were hired to work on it weren’t even told what they were working on – I guess this may have been it.

    If this deal comes off, it will give the music industry the shake-up it’s been needing, forcing the four others major labels to provide reasonably priced, easy to download music.

    If it happens, I foresee mass panic in the music industry.

  • BBC do synchronised media as it should be done

    I noticed today that the UK BBC has a broadband offering available at www.bbc.co.uk/broadband. The site looks like it may still be in testing, as it’s pretty confusing with a lot of ‘click here’ text and quite a few links that don’t lead anywhere useful.

    That aside, there are some really interesting pieces on it, in particular the Iraq Crisis Special Coverage. It’s a good example of a collection of video and other material that really provides depth to the subject.

    The synchronised media is well executed as is illustrated with Road to War/UN adopts 1441 piece. As the video plays, a link appears at the bottom on the right hand side about a ¼ of the way into the video. When this link is clicked, the video that was playing is paused, a screen-grab thumbnail representing it is placed to the right of the video playback window and the full-length footage started to play in the main video playback window. Clicking on the thumbnail takes the viewer back to the point that they left off in the main video. As the main video is coming to its end, a new link appears on the bottom right, taking viewers to a click-able map of Iraq that it overlays the main video area.

    This is the kind of work we did at LemonTV using Real and SMIL but, because of the vagaries of streaming video, the delivery over the Internet weren’t as polished as the BBC are now achieving.

    I found it very interesting that they are using Flash to deliver the synchronised media including the video. Until now, the BBC has exclusively used Real to delivery its audio and video material, but given the normal poor delivery of the BBC streaming, and streaming generally, I’m glad they’re looking at other areas.

    Here’s a quick list of advantages I see for them in using Flash over Real

    • Faster starting videos by using progressive download
    • They’re in total control of the format and the player
    • Copying the video is hard
    • They can pause video and bring in other video quickly
    • The interactivity can be incorporated in to one display area
    • No re-skilling to SMIL, they can use current Flash talent
    • Standard web serving – no need to pay for extra streaming server licences
    • Possibly there may be less bandwidth used

    If this is a taste of what’s going to be coming out of the BBC, all power to them.

    [BTW, if you’re trying to view the broadband content from outside the UK, you’re going to hit a problem – according to the BBC FAQ, it’s not available to non-licence payers.]

  • Download free music – legitimately

    OD2 are running another “Digital Download Day” which confusingly runs from today, 9th April 2003 until 15th April. Users signing up for it will be given £3, 5 Euro or $5.33 credit to download or listen to 150,000 songs that will be available from all five major labels – Sony, Warner Music, EMI, Universal Music and BMG.

  • TiVo Home Media Option released

    There’s a software upgrade for TiVo Series2 owners now available. The $99 Home Media Option gives the owner the ability to browser their photos, listen to their MP3’s, remote schedule recordings and view the recordings in many rooms around the house if they have a home network.

  • RIAA to sue four US college student

    Amazingly the RIAA is suing four US college student for running closed file-sharing networks on campus. It isn’t currently clear how the RIAA gained access to private on-campus networks.

    Many commentators thought the RIAA wouldn’t take action against people from the market that actually spend huge amount of money with the record companies currently. The thinking being that you don’t attack your customers base.

    Interestingly, one of the accussed, Aaron Sherman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was co-author of a paper entitled “Efficient Solutions for Peer to Peer Resource Discovery on Local Area Networks” [doc] near the end of last year. His particular contribution was software called FlatLan. There are some interesting quotes from the document

    FlatLan and Celery were designed as tools to locate files on a network, and were not designed to break Copyright laws. Although there are Copyrighted materials shared on the network, there are also many files created by students that are meant for free distribution.

    and

    As of now the RIAA has not contacted anyone from Phynd, Celery, or FlatLan to discuss the issue further

    It’s clear from this that Sherman was researching filesharing networks and was concerned with the efficiency with large numbers of music files and explicity references 1,000,000 files

    At 1,000,000 files shared, and each file (file name, path, size, date) taking an average of 86 bytes, it takes 86,000,000 bytes per index of the RPI network.

    which was, possibily by co-incidence, the number mentioned in the news report as the largest number of files found on one network.

    I hope the RIAA hasn’t gone in and stomped all over a student who was just carrying out a research project – they really would look pretty silly.

  • Sonicblue now to auction ReplayTV and Rio

    There is further news on the previous story of Sonicblue’s Chapter 11 troubles. They now plan to auction off the ReplayTV and Rio business units, after negotiations with D&M Holdings didn’t reach mutually agreeable terms.

    A large part of Sonicblue’s troubles were down to it having to spend $3m a month on legal fees.

  • Security holes in RealPlayer and QuickTime

    Security holes have been found in RealPlayer and QuickTime. Patches to fix the probelms are available.

  • Madonna releases latest single as an MP3

    I see that Madonna has released her latest single, American Life, as a downloadable MP3 well in advance of its official release on 29 April 2003.

    It’s encouraging to see that her label, Warner Brother Music, are being adventurous with an international star and it gives a glimmer of hope of the music business in the digital age. It may of course also be partially driven my Madge herself, as she’s normally pretty quick at picking up on things, not that this is lightening quick.

    The purchaser can download two differing qualities of the track, 128k, 192k, both in two formats, straight MP3 and Windows media with DRM. There’s even an affiliate scheme.

    Unfortunately, it’s not all upsides.

    • It costs $1.49, and in return you get a one of the mixes (radio version with rap) that will appear on the physical CD, but you don’t have a choice which mix it is.
    • $1.49 doesn’t reflect the huge cost savings of shipping bits instead of producing and shipping physical goods. Interestingly, it’s also around the price of one of the tracks of the CD version of the album.
    • It’s only available to US-based customers.
    • You can only pay for it using PayPal

    On the plus side, it’s refreshingly easy to go through the initial steps of purchase (Sadly I couldn’t complete it as I don’t live in the US). Warner are officially sanctioning the purchasers burning it to a CD – once and they are also allowing the copying of the track to portable audio players.

    Strangle the affiliate programme, which differs in one important regard – you don’t get any money, but you do get entered in to a competition to win Madonna goods.

    The advantages to Warner are many, for the price of sacrificing (as they would see it) of one mix of the single, they get quite a bit in return:-

    • Find out if users actually has an appetite for paying for MP3’s even if they are a high priced
    • As I assume that each of the downloads is individually marked with an ID linked, they get too watch the extent of file-exchange
    • Find out that given the option of an open file format like MP3, if consumers would be interested in having a file with DRM.
    • They’ll get lots of free publicity for the new album as coincidentally has the same name

    The only cloud on the clarity of the results is that, as it will probably be seen as a protest single, I’m not sure if the purchasing behaviour will reflect the normal patterns of purchase.

    I’m looking forward to hearing anything that Warner choose to release about their experiment.