A Boxee device will benefit from the relatively high name recognition Avner Ronen and his team have achieved with excellent consumer outreach and a truly engaging product that combines a slick interface with remarkably broad format support.  Perhaps most crucially is Boxee’s very winning social aspect that allows its users to share recommendations and even some video content with their circle of friends.  Of course, execution in the software world does not guarantee success in the very different world of hardware, and much of the gadget’s potential will depend on its actual specifications and price point, naturally, but having worked with Avner and his team a bit myself, I am confident that they will produce something that reflects their intense commitment to a  great user experience.  My guess, without any real inside information, is that the first Boxee box will likely be more of a “proof of concept” device, to get the idea of embedded Boxee out in the world and to provide other manufacturers with a basis to work from for their own product.  The truth is that some of the more engaging aspects of the Boxee application on PCs will be difficult to pull off on an inexpensive and lower-powered CE device.  My personal preference for this kind of functionality is however to use a small, low power and quiet HTPC.  Boxee makes for a great HTPC front end, and with the overall trend towards smaller more efficient PCs like the Atom-powered net-tops, it’s hard for me to envision a standalone Boxee device being better in the end.

For some time now, YouTube has had a feature on many videos that let you see videos “in HD”. Of course, this insinuates that the video will feature the highest quality sound you can hope for. The reality is that the quality of the video does depend on the original quality format the uploader has. If the uploader has a low quality video, YouTube isn’t necessarily going to magically turn it into “HD”.

While discussing an EU commissioner wanting to overhaul regulations related to downloading, we noted a British study that suggested that file-sharing is actually going down in popularity. The source that is gaining on the back of file-sharing’s decrease in popularity? Online streaming. Many are, in fact, getting their music from sites like MySpace and YouTube. Long before the release of the study that pointed to an increase in popularity of streaming, we wrote a guide on how to rip music from MySpace. There’s plenty of ways to get music from YouTube as a simple Google search reveals countless online YouTube stream rippers.

This phenomenon of users getting their music from streamed sources has caught the attention of a number of artists. Recently, this included an artist by the name “Deadmau5″ (pronounced ‘Dead mouse’). For the uninitiated, Deadmau5 is a famous House music producer from Canada. If you’re even somewhat into House music (or many forms of electronica for that matter), there’s a very good chance you’ve heard of this artist. In terms of popularity in a given genre, you could consider him the Linkin Park of House music only with significantly less lyrics.

“Quite frankly,” Deadmau5 wrote, “I kinda feel a bit bummed out that i would create something exclusive for my audiences to be “ripped” from some streaming media [site] as is… moreso when the poster of the media would advertise or title it as “HD” or “High Quality” before it’s release date.”

A little bit of background. Many artists such as Deadmau5, during a live show, beatmatches music together so there’s essentially a constant amount of music being played even though several different songs are played during a live show. Often, larger artists play their music long before their release dates to help promote the new song and increase popularity. Of course, similar styles of performing live transcends to radio as well. This is why some electronica music you hear seems to cut in and out at the end or get cut off completely. It’s called a set rip. There’s still that beatmatching and, consequently, that songs beginning (mostly drum kicks) and ending (also mostly drum kicks) are more or less cut off.

“In fact, Nothing makes me vomit in my mouth more than listening to anything short of a 16bit 44.1kHz Wav / Aiff file… perhaps it’s just the audiophile in me… but i am actually witnessing and realizing for the first time in my life something that i have created that has been reduced to some regurgetated re-re-re-re-recording of a set and dubbed “high quality”… quite frankly im a little embarassed.” Deadmau5 continues.

A WAV file is essentially an uncompressed sound file. When someone encodes it to MP3, the “highs” and “lows” start being lost in an effort to make the file smaller. A good way to demonstrate to yourself what the sound differences are between a high quality and a low quality version of an MP3 is, listened to a song that’s at 320KBps, then compare that to the same song that’s in an MP3 format of 128KBPs. If the differences are seemingly minimal, pay attention to the high hats or cymbals. You may notice that the hats get a little scratchy or distorted as quality is reduced. If you’re listening on, say, a subwoofer system, listen to how heavy the bass is as well.

Admittedly, when it comes to the really high quality stuff, I don’t personally notice the differences. The differences between a 32bit WAV file and a 16bit WAV file is completely inaudible to me. Unfortunately, I don’t own a $50,000 sound system to put my ears to the ultimate test. But if you are wondering, a 16bit WAV file is the quality of a standard CD without any compression (not even to save space as FLAC does without losing any quality). Of course, the difference between 16bit and 32bit isn’t even close to what Deadmau5 is getting at.

“So,” Deadmau5 explains, “situation happens… some guy records the set @ 16 bit 44.1kHz (usually the case) you’ve got my 24 bit version coming out of my DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) then in to someone elses ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) which is only as good as the quality of the ADC.. so already the quality of the music has been compromised, and you havent even gotten it yet.”

“Then, whoever records a direct line from the set then encodes that to 320kpbs MAX or 128 kbps mp3 for media streaming ease. this part is a MAAASSSIIIVEEE degradation of the original signal… and has been mulched to all bloody hell. So…. then what typically happens is yet ANOTHER DAC / ADC conversion…. wheres someone rips the audio from said streaming media outlet only to puke it back onto youtube… which is 128Kbps max in “HD” mode (which is a VERY far cry from HD if you ask me… total abuse of terminology there) shoulda [just] called it ABBDBNR….”A Bit Better Definition But Not Really”. fun times! so… to break it down… lets take a quick look again…”

“Production / Final Master
↓
degraded to 24 bits for live use
↓
degraded to 16 bits for commerical release / distribution
↓
degraded to 16 bits (less accurately) when recorded off a live feed from mixer via DAC / ADC
↓
degraded to 128kbps / 320kbps when published for streaming media outlets
↓
degraded to 128kbps / 320kbps when ripped from streaming media outlet
↓
degraded to 64kbps / 128kbps
=
a very crappy 6th generation copy that magically gets called “HIGH QUALITY VERSION!!!111ONE!!” on youtube…. you figure it out.”

Transcoding has been a problem in the file-sharing community for years, long before the streaming revolution. The situation then was typically someone finding a 128kbps MP3, then re-encoding it into a 320kbps mp3, either thinking that they have a higher quality version of the song or trying to dupe others into believing it’s higher quality. That was typically going along the lines of, “producer quality, degraded to 16bit-like quality for CD, ripped and encoded into a low quality MP3, uncompressed and encoded again to 320kbps”. That’s a 4th generation version, not even a 6th generation version as described by Deadmau5.

Additionally, thanks to standards in streaming and YouTube, the quality is forced to be of a certain level of (lower) quality, so the amount of quality lost is even greater because you lose more quality in each step and that quality doesn’t come back once it’s lost once.

Deadmau5 concludes, “I just think it’s time for us listeners to listen smarter, to educate eachother a little more, give the audiable world out there a bit of a quality control attitude, LISTEN UP folks… our hearing is really a fucking complicated and beautiful thing!!! Why not use it well? It’s like owning the most amazing sportscar and not a drop of gasoline on the planet…. Sometimes when i stick my ears out there, im really starting to fear that even the terminologic use of the words “high quality” is slowing substandardizing itself into an inaudiable heap of nonsense. If my message reaches at least one person, and benefits them in any way, i will die a happy mouse.”

There’s many ways to look at this from an artist standpoint. A positive way to spin the stream ripping activities is to say that if you buy the music, the quality is much greater. Consider it an extra incentive for music fans to legally pay for music for example. We’re not necessarily talking about users who are higher up on the file-sharing food chain here most of the time. Chances are, the users who are listening to ripped streaming music aren’t members of 6 different private sites as the quality difference is monumental between streamed music and, say, FLAC – though people higher up in the file-sharing food-chain are much more encouraged to buy what they like anyway.

Another way one can look at this is the tried, tested and true ‘free advertising’ culture. More people are listening to your music – even if it’s low quality. That means the number of potential customers goes up – or a larger fan base more likely to go to the shows where there’s high quality music being played anyway – countless people see that touring is a huge income earner for artists to begin with.

So has the transcoding problem worsened thanks to streaming? No doubt. The bigger question is, is it at the detriment of artists and listeners?

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.

In a report that has, thus far, remained almost exclusively a French story to date, a French film director has pressured Canadian website BeeMotion.fr into going offline. One report from 01net says that the website is illegal because it also contained advertising. It’s a peculiar move that resembles one of the arguments made against the “spectrial” of ThePirateBay.

It’s an interesting development given that it’s often extremely difficult or impossible in some countries to argue that a person who creates a dynamic website is suddenly committing acts of copyright infringement because of the actions of their users. Additionally, video streaming websites that allow users to upload their own home-made videos have been continually under fire from copyright corporations like Viacom for alleged copyright infringement. In some cases, even with a notice and takedown system, that doesn’t stop sites like YouTube from being sued by, say, foreign broadcasters.

All this goes back to the tired old question, if you create a tool that could be used for copyright infringement, is the creator of that tool suddenly responsible for the actions of their users? The answer, thus far, seems to have almost always been, ‘only if the creator doesn’t have financial backing to fend off overzealous lawyers and the copyright industry’.

In spite of this setback by the website, the website administrator of BeeMotion Streaming wrote in their blog (Google Translation) that they might make a comeback in the future. Seeing as how the only reason they were pushed offline in the first place was because the site was hosted on a French server, it’s likely that the only required move is to have the site hosted on a server in a different country. Not all streaming sites are backed by companies like Google it seems.

There’s an interesting story on the New York Times recently about stream piracy which is where someone manages to get a stream from a major sports event pirated online live for free. The strange part is the fact that they practically tell you exactly how to get a pirated stream while some involved in the business end of sports talk about it being a threat.

In short, many major sports organizations are talking about how stream piracy is currently embryonic and not a major threat yet, but could be in the future. The story goes on to say how intellectual property officials complain how tvants.com is one of the biggest websites to get such feeds. The question is, if there were those that are worried about this sort of thing, why tell people on one of the largest news outlets in the entire United States where to get the pirated streams in the first place? No doubt there are alternatives out there as well to the site.

The good news in all of this is the fact that if stream piracy sharply rises, we have the very people who are most likely wanting to stop it to thank because they instructed everyone in the first place.

Sports, when it comes to p2p, has generally gotten off easy with only highlights off of sports broadcasters highlight reels appearing on video sites like YouTube. Still, the sports industry has capitalized off of the fact that the business is run off of the live broadcasting instead of something that has a set length and is quite viewable over and over again. Once a game ends, it’s over. Pirated live streaming could very well change a lot of this. Not everything can be received through a generic BitTorrent site.

Note to MLB officials – if you don’t want someone getting your games for free, don’t leave instructions with your plea.

Bell Canada seems to have a hard sell – convince everyone that throttling wholesalers as well as their own customers was necessary. Selling the idea originally got tough when they throttled their wholesalers without initial notice. Selling the idea got even tougher when they said that they were at 33% capacity. The privacy commissioner was asked to investigate Bell over Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) techniques which didn’t help things on Bell’s side. Now Bell has disclosed some new figures that seems to be only adding more fuel to the fire.

The documents can be found on a thread at DSL reports – a thread that makes for some interesting reading no less. The documents show the following graph:

It’s interesting to note that Bell chose one of the most populated areas in Canada to try and prove that they are congested. what’s more interesting is how Bell tries to sell these statistics as proof that they need to throttle everyone who uses their networks:

One needs to be cautious about simply looking at absolute number of congested links over time. For example, as noted in Bell Canada(CRTC)15May08-2 CAIP Part VII, non-P2P traffic that is not being managed as part of the Company’s traffic management solution has been able to use up and flow more freely using the bandwidth previously occupied by P2P file sharing traffic during peak periods. Similarly, other non-P2P types of traffic such as video streaming are growing at a faster pace than in prior years. Furthermore, one must consider the impacts of seasonal fluctuations in traffic patterns generally. Finally, the number of congested links over the period in the table above is also affected by the rate of deployment of the Company’s traffic management solution.

Some suggest that Bell has admitted in these documents that their throttling practices are not relieving any possible congestion or bandwidth issues. Last year, an Ellacoya study found that there is more HTTP related traffic than p2p traffic online. The study alone makes Bell’s comment that video streaming is merely “growing” rather than, say, “competing with” P2P traffic.

So is it just conspiracy theory that Bell may have just cherry-picked Ontario and Quebec because it would show the highest amount of capacity? Not really if one were to read the supplementary document:

The map below illustrates the central offices with congested links demonstrating that while congestion occurs throughout the Bell Canada network, unsurprisingly it is more concentrated in the main population centres of Ottawa, Montréal and the Greater Toronto Area.

So clearly, they admit, at the very least, they used statistics for their most congested links to try and sell their idea that they have to employ Deep Packet Inspection techniques to save their network. Obviously, investing in these areas is a little easier because there isn’t as much of a geographical issue to take into consideration. Geography is often the biggest argument to explain why there isn’t as much competition in Canada in the Internet Service Providing industry compared to countries like Japan which is sometimes cited as being a country with faster internet connections.

It’s not currently clear how this will affect the outcome of the hearings at the CRTC.

Hat tip: Michael Geist

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Bell_Canada_No_Really_We_Are_Overloaded_8_in_2_Cases’;

NewTeeVee noted a report on the Wall Street Journal which points to concern that the Chinese government has shut down popular Chinese video sharing site 56.com.

The suggestion on 56.com was that they were down for maintenance, but the site has been down for maintenance since the third of this month. The lengthy downtime, according to the report, is sparking concerns that the Chinese government is actually censoring the site. 56.com is no small site either since, according to Alexa, currently boasts a traffic ranking of 83 overall with traffic primarily originating from China.

“At the start of the year,” writes Chris Albrecht of NewTeeVee, “Chinese regulators said that video sites would have to be state-owned. The government later clarified its list of requirements for video sites, including the types of content that must be filtered. The strict regulations leaves the state of the online video business in China in flux.”

Apparently, the trouble of the video streaming business in Asia isn’t solely originating in China. According to Chosun, a news outlet in South Korea, five CEOs of a South Korea based video streaming outlet were arrested for copyright violations recently. From the report:

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office on Tuesday said it arrested the presidents of five companies including Nowcom, which runs PDBOX, and KUTECH, which runs Endisk. The total number of the members of these five firms mount to 23.38 million, and the sales W74 billion (US$1=W1,024).

They are charged with promoting the illegal circulation of domestic and foreign films online by giving “heavy uploaders” 10 percent of their revenues from downloaders. According to the prosecutors, if a user pays W300 to download one film, the one who uploaded it gets W30, and the storage company earns W270. The system generates an estimated loss of W1.1 trillion for the domestic film industry, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors decided not to prosecute those who downloaded the files as their number is too large and it is difficult to assume that they knew the files they downloaded violated copyright.

But some Internet users say the government, unhappy with the candlelight vigils, has started cracking down on the Internet as a form of revenge. “As Afreeca became a mecca of online protests with over 7 million watching live broadcasts of candlelight vigils, we remain suspicious at the nature of this investigation,” Nowcom says. “It cannot be ruled out that a political motive is involved.” Prosecutors brushed off the claim, explaining that the investigation began in April, even before the candlelight vigils started, and Afreeca is not even part of this investigation.

NewTeeVee covered the story saying “South Korea has one of the highest broadband penetration rates in the world; 40 MBit connections in the home are not uncommon. Koreans used to make use of these fast connections by swapping files P2P-style, but users have migrated to web-based storage solutions since the popular file-swapping system Soribada was forced to shut down in 2005.”

Further reading:

Free accounts do, however, have limited download speeds. Users have to buy or earn rewards points to get faster downloads, and you can earn points if other users download your files. This rewards system seems to be at the core of the investigations against the companies involved. Prosecutors have told Chosun Ilbo that the company rewards heavy uploaders with up to 10 percent of the money it makes from movie downloads.

Webhard services have been targeted by prosecutors and the entertainment industry for a while now, but Korean activists have always criticized efforts to shut down or restrict those services as heavy-handed and “a surrender (…) to pressure from the U.S.”

Anti-U.S. sentiments are also at the core of the dispute about the recent crackdown. Protests against the government’s decision to allow imports of U.S. meat have hit the Korean government hard in recent weeks. Nowcom execs believe their company was targeted because it offered these protests an online forum, according to JoongAng Ilbo.

NewTeeVee also points to statement which contains the following:

“The arrests naturally make us question whether the government authorities are conducting this probe with a politically motivated intention to prevent the expansion of candlelight vigils,” the company said in a statement posted on Afreeca.com.

“Nowcom never helped Internet users infringe upon copyrights of materials either,” the statement said.

Prosecutors said Afreeca.com is not the target of the investigation.

“The film industry has been filing lawsuits against online storage services since March,” said Koo Bon-jin, a senior prosecutor at the Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office. “Our investigation is focused on how these storage services are involved in circulating pirated films.”

In a world where privacy has become a thing of the past in the US and in Sweden, people could soon face total disconnection from the internet in France based on three copyright complaints and a theory that making available is copyright infringement floating around, one hopes that these two incidences in Asia isn’t a sign of things to come for Western society as well.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Two_Asian_Countries_Crack_Down_on_Video_Sharing_Sites’;

NewTeeVee recently posted a story about BinTube, software that claims to be able to stream videos on UseNet.

The complexities of UseNet may have some skeptical about the software. What about file corruption and repairing the parts through Par files? According to the FAQ:

Automatic Decoding, Combining, Extraction and Repair:
All the steps required to download binaries from Usenet are performed simultaneously and in a multithreaded fashion.

[...]Full support of NZB files.

[...]Smart Repair File Download:
BinTube Media Player downloads Parity files (Par files) only when repair is needed. If repair is needed only the minimum amount of data required for the repair is downloaded.

So, is this some kind of hoax? Vapor ware? Not according to one reporter. NewTeeVee actually had a chance to test drive the software and actually says that, more often than not, it actually works:

Granted, BinTube isn’t perfect. The program fails to play some titles at all, and others can only be played back after a complete download. More often that not, it works just as advertised, playing videos in near real time after just a few minutes of initial downloading. But aside from that, functionality is pretty limited. Downloads have to be manually deleted after you’re done watching them, and it’s not possible to automatically download each new episode of a specific show.

It certainly is an interesting development. BinTube also features a search function which searches through UseNet for files. This feature is similar to that of the main feature of BinSearch. They both can search for anything on UseNet.

It’s unlikely that this will become the next YouTube where everyone uses it. This is mainly because connecting to UseNet is often the main stumbling block for many users. Not every p2p user will pay to have access to content, even if it’s a guarantee that there’s no need to watch out for share ratios and that there’s always going to be a download speed that’s as fast as your connection allows it. Some users don’t have an ISP that provides UseNet – though some may be lucky even if the retention rate is as bad as a few days.

BinTube website

Via p2p-blog.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Streaming_Coming_to_UseNet’;

Anybody who listens to music on their home PC will tell you that Winamp is one of the better media player programs around. From it’s relatively small memory footprint (4,000 K for myself at the moment), to it’s wide variety of plugins, visualizations, and enhancements, Winamp is a great program to have when it comes to playing music files on your home PC.

But, what if you aren’t at home and you still wish to access your home music library without having to setup any complicated FTP or remote access clients or programs? What if you’re using somebody else’s PC or laptop and all you have is a browser and internet connection? Well, Winamp Remote BETA let’s you listen to all of your music anywhere, anytime without having to worry about any of this. Just leave the plugin running when you leave home and then simply login using a browser and connection from wherever you like.

Its perfect for when you’re on vacation or wanting to grab some decent tunes at a friends house whose collection is filled with one too many country-western or death metal albums.

SO HOW DO I GET STARTED?
1. Install Winamp

First of all, if you haven’t already, download and install the Winamp media player (it’s pretty self-explanatory)

2. Install the Winamp Remote BETA plugin.

Next download and install the Winamp Remote BETA plugin, the steps of which I detail for you below.

Here is where you will create a USER ACCOUNT NAME and PASSWORD with which you will you be using to login to your PC remotely.

Be sure when selecting your username and password that they are SECURE as well as easy to remember so as to prevent against unwanted users from accessing your PC.

**PASSWORD SECURITY HINT: A trick I learned a while back that is pretty brilliant I think, is to combine 2 easy to remember words into a single, virtually undecipherable one. For example > CAT & DOG = C+D+A+O+T+G. You simply intertwine the 2 by offsetting their order. Pretty neat right? Who will ever think that CDAOTG is you password?**

When done then select the “Next” tab and submit the information you entered.

WHAT DO I DO BEFORE I LEAVE MY HOUSE?
CHECK PLUGIN STATUS

First of all, before you leave home, make sure the Winamp Remote BETA plugin is running. You should see the icon displayed in the system icon try at the bottom left-hand part of your screen. This is what acts as the remote server allowing you to access your PC.

HOW DO I CONNECT?
1. Go to http://www.orb.com/winamp/index.html
2. Log in

Lastly, type in your USERNAME and PASSWORD and select the “Sign In” tab.

HOW DO I LISTEN TO MY MUSIC?
Once logged in, the user interface is pretty straightforward.

The left-hand part of the screen will list the directory of your home music library. This will be the “My Music” folder on your PC (C:Documents and SettingsAdministratorMy DocumentsMy Music).

Scrolling through my “Comedy” music selection, I selected the new Andy Dick album “Do Your Shows Always Suck.” Double-click on the track you wish to play, as I have done as shown below.

This will automatically launch and load the track in the Winamp media player.

IS THAT IT? IS IT THAT EASY?

Pretty much. Winamp Remote BETA offers a few other options like streaming video and picture viewing but, they are both still too complicated and buggy to recommend for you here. When they become better supported I will let you know.

In the meantime enjoy Winamp Remote BETA. Now you can take your music library with you everywhere,

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/software/WINAMP_Remote_BETA_a_guide_to_the_new_P2P_music_streaming_feature’;

RELATED NEWS AND “HOW TO” GUIDES:
Ready to be an Internet DJ?
Getting to Know Your Audio Files
Stream thousands of Rock N’ Roll concert classics for free on “Wolfgang’s Vault”
How to Rip Music From MySpace
3 Quick Ways to Watch Movies for FREE!
3 quick ways to watch TV shows for FREE
BitTorrent tracker sites & search engines
Azureus – A Beginner’s Guide to BitTorrent Downloading
Watch The Simpsons, The Office, Jackass, South Park, Lost, X-Men, and More On-Demand For Free

SOULXTC: “walkin’ the streets of P2P”