Easy-to-use program allows users to burn nearly any video file to DVD with a few clicks; supports over 45 video file formats, and contains no adware, spyware, or limitations of any kind.

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When was the last time you burned a CD or a DVD? If you haven't done that in a while, you aren't alone according to a copyright collective that collects royalties on blank discs. With slumping blank disc sales, the royalty collecting agency is scrambling to find the next thing to tax to keep revenue money flowing.

Income generated from a copy fee built in to the price of recordable CDs and DVDs – and shared among artists and copyright holders – has almost halved over the last two years. In 2007, sales of blank discs generated 200 million kronor ($28 million) for artists, compared to just 113 million kronor in 2009.

“We’re seeing a technology shift whereby the discs in themselves are no longer of interest. File sharers and others have started using different technologies. Things can instead be stored on people’s computer hard drives or their telephones,” Copyswede’s managing director Mattias Åkerlind told news agency TT.

Copyswede’s proposed fee would add around 100 kronor to the cost of a mobile phone with 32 gigabytes of memory. But negotiations have stalled of late, with the organisation enjoying scant support from electronics retailers opposed to price hikes on goods like telephones and hard disks.

Sony boss Michael Lynton complains that rampant piracy and legal commercial P2P has put the country on the verge of "no longer being a viable home entertainment market."

Things look quite a bit different right now, at least according to the New York Times.  New data suggests that Blu-Ray is taking off, with large growth numbers for non-PS3 players, as the standalone devices replace older DVD players particularly for new owners of 1080p capable TV’s.  To the surprise of almost no one, however, overwhelming credit for Blu-Ray’s new success has been the dramatic lowering of the price of new players.  Many well-reviewed devices can be obtained for less than $150, with some even going below the “magic” $100 price point when impulse buying is thought to become more prevalent.  While not seen as nearly as important, Blu-Ray devices have received a palapable boost from the growing presence of net-enabled services being offered via the machines, including Netflix streaming, YouTube videos, Amazon VOD, even CinemaNow.  The much more powerful chips necessary to decode HD 1080p video streams also allow for these kind of processing tasks in a way that previous generation DVD players could never dream of doing.

Nonetheless, I remain somewhat skeptical of the longer term viability of the format, and certainly doubt it will ever become as ubiquitous as the DVD.  There are still many, many households in the US that do not have HDTV’s just yet, nor plan to in the near future as long as their currently working model survives.  Regular DVD is good enough for most viewers, even if they do have an HDTV, particularly as the cost of Blu-Ray media remains consistently much higher than DVD.  More importantly, however, the growing use of net-based video services to sell Blu-Ray players clearly demonstrates the growing appetite among viewers for content, even high quality content, to be delivered via the Internet, and not physical media.  And there are a number of ways to do that besides Blu-Ray, particularly as TV manufacturers begin to build connectivity directly into their monitors.  Not to mention the appeal of the much more flexible HTPC, that can play back anything from the online world, and can play Blu-Ray discs as well if a BR drive is installed.  Blu-Ray players may be currently a semi-cheaper way to get Netflix streaming in the living room, but any advantages they may have right now in price and convenience will likely disappear very quickly as other technologies catch up.

Even more, for members of the downloading community, Blu-Ray players offer very little.  As we all know, the much touted next generation DRM scheme designed for Blu-Ray, called AACS, proved to be as vulnerable as every other DRM scheme, and was cracked almost instantly.  Other content protection schemes tried with Blu-Ray, including the notorious BD+, have also done nothing to prevent wide-scale pirating of Blu-Ray content.  Unlike DivX Certified DVD players from the past, hardly any standalone Blu-Ray players offer much support for compelling online formats like Matroska.  Blu-Ray burning drives in PCs also continue to be both expensive and rare.

Ironically, for anybody with a decent broadband connection, the user experience is probably better watching Blu-Ray content using an HTPC than a standalone player.  First, the content becomes available faster, as most Blu-Ray rips appear weeks, sometimes months before their commercial release.  Second, the extra content so often touted by the movie studios has very little actual appeal, and its absence from a downloaded .mkv file actually speeds up load time.  Finally, the lack of any physical media means that collections of movies can be stored on hard drives or remote servers, preventing the need to store discs around the house, as anyone with even a moderate DVD collections is well aware.

But that is just one viewpoint.  Have any of you made the switch fully to Blu-Ray?  Tried out standalone players?  Or used your PlayStation3 for Blu-Ray playback?  Do you buy or rent Blu-Ray discs?  Or do downloaded Matroska files fill your need for HD content?  Do you have a different opinion on the future of Blu-Ray?

-Bruce

But just as Napster and its successors depended on the MP3 format in order to make music files small enough to be traded over even slow Internet connections, the video file sharing boom kicked off by DeCSS also depended on a compression format, in this case MPEG-4 ASP, or as it was more commonly called at the time, DivX.  DivX, and its open source variant Xvid, are actually not specific formats, but were video codecs designed to create MPEG-4 ASP video streams that were usually contained in an .avi file container along with MP3 encoded audio.  Nonetheless, capitalizing on the timeliness of the DeCSS + DivX solution, and the recent release of The Matrix on DVD for the first time in 1999, video file sharing took off in 1999, becoming a mass phenomenon for the first time, even if it paled in size compared to the MP3 craze started by Napster.  And of course, the release of Bittorrent in 2001 further sped up things up considerably.

I was inspired to write this bit about the history of video file-trading when I recently saw that Handbrake, the popular software video encoding application finally released a new version.  The lastest version, 0.9.4 took a year in development, and includes a number of new features and improvements, but one change in particular took me by surprise.  The latest version of Handbrake drops support for Xvid, and justifies the exclusion on the grounds that Xvid, and MPEG-4 ASP more generally, are dead and hence no longer worth investing development time into.  Over the last couple of years the “successor” to MPEG-4 ASP, officially called MPEG-4 AVC but more commonly known as h.264, has become the de facto standard for quality video online.  For years, pretty much every video file downloaded from Bittorrent, Usenet, etc. was encoded in Xvid, usually in a size that corresponded to the capacity of a CD.  For sure, many people did download the larger MPEG-2 based DVD file image, but Xvid was the king of illegally traded video.

Now, at least according to the developers of Handbrake, the usefulness of MPEG-4 ASP is over, at least on the individual user level.  And of course, any cursory examination of what’s getting traded online these days would show a massive number of files encoded by x264, the popular open source version of h.264, especially high definition video files.  Yet, there remains a very large number of Xvid encodes out there, and those files can make use of the well developed MPEG-4 ASP infrastructure of compatible devices, especially DivX Certified DVD players.  Devices that can play h.264 files downloaded from online (which usually means in a Matroska or MKV file container) are still relatively unusual, although that is likely to change in the near future.

What are your formats of choice?  Do you still download Xvid files?  Or have you switched entirely over to x264?  Or did you always stay with MPEG-2 DVD files?

At issue is a Finnish EU copyright directive which came into force in 2006 which criminalizes the act of merely talking about circumventing DRM. Mikko Rauhala had started a web discussion forum to also talk about the downfalls of the directive as well.

EDRI has more details:

However the Police started its investigation with the public prosecutor who was supported strongly by the Finnish Anti-Piracy Association which arranged the “expert” testimonies for the prosecutor. Soon thereafter, the case was referred to the Helsinki District Court which decided in Rauhala’s favor; that CSS was not a type of protection measure covered by the Directive and therefore the ban did not apply. The district attorney appealed to the Helsinki Appellate Court, which stated that Mr. Rauhala was guilty of illegally circumventing a technological protection measure and of providing an illegal service for the circumvention of protection measures. The Supreme Court of Finland denied Mr. Rauhala’s application.

Since all of the court decisions that were involved in the case wouldn’t touch freedom of expression as defined in the Finnish constitution, Rauhala had to take his case to European Court of Human Rights.

Given that this is a free speech issue, it’s extremely difficult to see what the Finnish authorities hope to accomplish here. If the mere act of talking about a DRM is banned, people will simply move to a website hosted and operated outside of the borders of Finland – not to mention using proxies to cover their trails in the process. Any punishment Rauhala would face is not immediately clear in this or other past reports.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

There is word recently on TehSkeen that a software tool has been developed for the Nintendo Wii that allows gamers to play back-up copies of Nintendo Wii games. The claims were backed up by video that was reposted on YouTube:

If one is skeptical about the mere screen capture of what is going on, a video of someone physically entering the disc into the system and doing the same thing (albeit, with a lower quality) is here:

Additional information is available on TehSkeen. Here’s a sample:

It’s time for another exclusive video from TehSkeen. This time our feature presentation is a demonstration of the work in progress Nintendo Wii Backup Loader coded by the infamous and often controversial hacking guru Waninkoko. Yeah, read the first sentence again if you’re at a loss for words.

The ISO Loader works like this. You create a legal backup of a game you own, convert the ISO file with a special program then burn it. After this, you copy over the ISO Loader to the Homebrew Channel and run it. It will boot the legal backup. Pretty simple. Oh, and no modchip is required. However, it does require you to have Waninkoko’s Custom IOS installed.

This is a unprecedented moment in Nintendo Wii hacking history as is probably going to cause a massive movement in the scene. Too bad Nintendo didn’t take Bushing’s advice on blocking the method of doing this. Maybe they will now? Of course, this sort of thing isn’t condoned by the “general” homebrew scene and when it’s released will ultimately lead to some turmoil.

TehSkeen doesn’t support piracy. We don’t index releases, we don’t spread torrents, we don’t run contests to dump VC/Wiiware games. Heck, we don’t host any tools to inject WAD files with. Waninkoko’s motivation for creating the ISO Loader is unknown, but it is illegal and morally wrong to use it for booting illegal copies of games you don’t own.

The last paragraph has pretty much been a staple disclaimer for any kind of console video-game backups. It dates clear back to when NES emulators for the PC were programmed and dumping the information off of the cartridge into ROM files were the standard ways to make backup copies of legitimately paid for games. One of the more infamous disclaimers was basically (paraphrased as there is frequent variations of this particular one) ‘if you do not legitimately own the game for the respective ROM, you must delete the ROM within 24 hours.’

While some are arguing that this is merely fair use and an extension of the practice of backing up PC games, people like the reporter from GIzmondo have quickly called the news as “the Holy Grail of Wii piracy”

Is there cause for concern over the possibility that Nintendo would do everything in its power to stop such technology? Nintendo has already legally pursued companies importing R4 chips for the Nintendo DS in Japan just two months ago. It’s unclear whether or not they would go after a non-profit entity though.

Whichever side a person is on, those who watch what is going on with Nintendo Wii hacking have almost unanimously agreed that what has happened will have a huge impact for Nintendo Wii fans. It is pretty much only the beginning of things to come, but what they are is, naturally, yet to be seen.

It may be a first in Europe. There is a new effort to combat piracy (it appears to be geared towards physical piracy) but what is being demanded may prove to be very controversial. All this is according to a fresh report off of the Irish Examiner.

While there are relatively few who support physical piracy, there’s also relatively few who would support circumventing the need to obtain a warrant whenever a crime is suspected to be taking place. It’s a recipe for heated debate if anything else.

The report says that 76,569 unauthorized DVDs were seized last year with 62,724 unauthorized DVDs already seized this year. While this suggests that current laws are already sufficient in stopping physical piracy operations, it apparently isn’t enough for the Justice Minister. From the report:

Harsh penalties for land or property owners who allow pirated material to be sold on their sites are also recommended.

Launching the inter-departmental committee report, Mr Ahern said the extent and sophistication of DVD piracy had grown hugely in recent years and was now operating on a quasi-industrial scale.

“There seems to be a casual assumption that the only victims of this type of crime are faceless international corporations, or millionaire movie stars. That is not the case.

“Ordinary employment and business livelihoods are threatened right here in Ireland, whether it is in the production of films, or their sale or distribution in cinemas and retail outlets,” he said.

While we are not familiar with what the stigma in Ireland would be whenever a political figure wants to eliminate the requirement of getting a warrant for anything, the idea is a complete culture shock to North Americans. This was clearly demonstrated by the fierce ongoing debates surrounding the warrantless wiretapping done by AT&T.

The casual observer will likely note that moves such as this has the potential to put a country onto a slippery slope towards unprecedented and frequently undesired police powers.

While potentially a very disturbing development, such a move happened a few months ago in the United States where the Motion Picture Association of America argued that evidence is not needed to convict someone of unauthorized file-sharing.

This latest move is quite a notable development in a country where the last controversy has been the long-running data breach controversy.

It’s almost a cliché all on it’s own. China is a major hotbed for piracy. Of course, a number of these accusations come from major anti-piracy organizations like the MPA (Motion Picture Association) which says:

Illegal motion picture and television piracy is a thriving international enterprise. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) estimates that its member companies lose approximately US$1.2 billion each year in potential revenue in the Asia-Pacific region alone, and US$6.1 billion globally. In many countries, MPA member company losses are far outstripped by production, theatrical exhibition, home video distribution losses to local industry, as well as losses to governments in uncollected tax revenues. Consumer spending losses on filmed entertainment worldwide are estimated at US$18.2 billion.

If you follow the press releases of the Motion Picture Association, you’d think that it’s a miracle that any sort of entertainment industry even exists over in China because of widespread piracy. Recently released figures suggest that China’s online video game industry is not only surviving, but thriving and growing. With this thought, perhaps the other cliché of the Chinese economy growing at an incredible rate might be more fitting.

The report comes from a media outlet in Taiwan called Digitimes. The report says that the Chinese video game industry has “generated total revenue of 4.43 billion yuan (US$637 million) during the second quarter of 2008, rising by 11.2% on quarter and 65.9% on year, according to China-based consulting company Analysys International.”

Not bad for one quarter. So how does the US gaming market compare? According to an ESA report:

The computer and video game industry’s value added to U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2006 was $3.8 billion

It might be poor economics/math, but if one were to divide that number by 4, you would get $950 million USD per quarter on average – a difference between the markets by $313 million.

Unfortunately, most of the articles on DigiTimes is behind a paywall, but if one were to look at the headlines in the “related” section, one would see, “China market: Online gaming services valued at nearly 4 billion yuan in 1Q08″, “China market: Online gaming services valued at over 3.3 billion yuan in 4Q07″, “China market: Online gaming services valued at over 2.9 billion yuan in 3Q07″, “China market: Online gaming valued at 2.67 billion yuan in 2Q07″ Quite an impressive rate of growth (note: headlines in reverse chronological order. #Q denotes the quarter of the year and the two numbers following denotes last two digits of the year) considering the country is said to have a huge piracy problem.

It’s not perfectly clear what this means for all the claims of piracy, but it certainly puts the so-called devastating effects of piracy, even in China, in question here. We here at ZeroPaid don’t support physical piracy, but we also don’t support the distortion of facts on a situation either.

There’s an interesting report from The times of India where there is a problem – there’s not enough piracy courts to deal with the load of busted pirates.

Of course, for the average North American, the concept of a “piracy court” is pretty much unheard of. Generally speaking, when someone gets sued for copyright infringement, they go through a regular court system just like any other case. Judging by what this report suggests, there is a court set aside in India to deal specifically with alleged pirates.

It may seem like overkill, but not only is there a court specifically set aside for piracy cases, the court is bogged down by the sheer volume of cases it has to deal with. The cases are “bailable” but people caught up in the system, it’s been extremely difficult. From the report:

Take the case of Madala Krishna Prasad who was arrested on charges of video piracy in Ongole on July 22, 2008.

He was remanded in judicial custody the next day. But when the bail petition was moved by his counsel, the judge expressed his helplessness as the case did not fall under his jurisdiction.

Then the counsel, K Venkata Reddy, moved another bail petition before the additional chief metropolitan magistrate court, which is the designated court for such offences. He rejected to hear the petition because the remand was in a different court.

Then the counsel moved a lunch motion in the high court on Friday. Justice P Swarup Reddy granted bail to the accused in this case. Now the counsel has to go to the Ongole court again to submit the bail documents to secure freedom for the accused . In all the accused will be in jail for more than 12 days for an offence that is bailable. “We have heard of similar cases in Anantapur and elsewhere in the state in this type of offences,” he said.

It’s not entirely clear what the report is specifically referring to when it says ‘video piracy’ and a Google search of the persons name only refers to the above article. Whether it means videos being sold on bootleg DVDs or videos being downloaded online is unclear. One might hope that resorting to courts being set aside in North America won’t be necessary.