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Weekly News Roundup (5 April 2015)

Sunday, April 5th, 2015

A short WNR this week, I guess maybe it’s because of the Easter break. May you have success in your hunt for the eggs of the Leporidae.

Otherwise, it’s been a really difficult week for finding news stories. Not because there weren’t any, but because there were too many, with approximately 94.12% all being April Fools made up stories. People have gotten really good at making up these, so it’s no longer obvious just which stories are April Fools and it’s been really frustrating trying to figure things out.

GOG frees your game from its awful DRM via its new “reclaim” program

GOG, forever fighting the good fight against DRM, has a new weapon in its arsenal – DRM-free reclaiming! The idea is simple – got a game whose DRM has expired which makes the game no longer playable? Simply enter the game’s serial key into GOG’s reclaim page, and you get a free and DRM-free copy of the game that will work forever.

Only a couple of games are supported now (basically just STALKER games at this time), but GOG plans to add more games once more publishers sign up, and the not-so-fun sounding “scavenger hunt to retrieve forgotten key-databases”.

I really hope more publishers sign up to GOG’s scheme – I mean they have nothing to lose, and really, they owe their paying customers this much. And if I was a publisher that used a DRM that’s likely to expire, I would openly advertise the fact that the DRM would be removed from the game after a set period of time (say a year?), and give their paying customers the peace of mind that they deserve!

4K streaming is great … when using it doesn’t take down the whole neighbourhood’s Internet

HEVC is already one of the most efficient ways to encode 4K video, but if the claims from firm V-Nova is to be believed, their Perseus codec will be even better. Of course claims like this have been made before, and only real-world testing will tell us whether this closed, proprietary codec is all that it claims to be.

But even if Perseus is as good as it claims to be, there’s no guarantee that it, or any other codec, will take the place of HEVC as the industry preferred compression standard. Even Google’s public backing of their own VP9 codec failed to make a real dent into the popularity of HEVC, so sometimes it’s not about technical merit (which often does not stack up to press release claims), but simply about marketing and getting the most hardware and software partners – something that HEVC did really well (true of its predecessor, H.264/AVC), signing up to partner like Netflix, Samsung, and being selected for use for Ultra HD Blu-rays.

Here in Australia, the news of a even more efficient codec is a welcomed one, since the arrival of Netflix has all but crippled our flaky Internet. Our current Luddites-in-charge (ie. our government) keeps on insisting that nobody needs faster Internet, not now and not in ten year’s time, and so promptly cancelled plans to roll out 100 Mbps fibre and replace it with a “up-to” 25 Mbps FTTN network (depending on how far you are from the exchange). Considering that a single 4K Netlix stream could theoretically max out the connection for a typical FTTN users, the need for a 50 or 100 Mbps connections is something that’s quite real right now.

Zelda for the Wii U has been delayed until 2016

The Legend of Zelda for Wii U has been delayed until 2016. If there’s one thing that really bugs me about how Nintendo has handled the Wii U is the lack of a Zelda for the platform. The rumor is that Nintendo’s next console may be coming in 2017, which means that there won’t be a Zelda game on the Wii U until pretty much the last year of its status as Nintendo’s flagship console. Compare that to ‘Twilight Princess’, which was released on the Wii pretty much at launch (also available on the GameCube, the last Nintendo release for that platform) and really helped to show off the Wii’s innovative controls, even if it was really just a port from the GameCube version. I just feel that had the release line-up for the Wii U included a made-for-the-platform Zelda game, the console’s fortunes might have been different – remember that it wasn’t until the Wii U Mario Kart game that the Wii U started to sell in better numbers.

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Have a great Easter break, if you have one. See you next week!

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (5 April 2015)

Weekly News Roundup (29 March 2015)

Monday, March 30th, 2015

The way I see it, how licensing works today is so inefficient. Someone like Netflix has to negotiate with the same studios (or at least studios with the same parent company) over and over again, in every country that it’s available in. And studios, forever trying to squeeze the last cent from distribution deals, are still using the old way of thinking in regards to release windows, exclusivity deals, and different licenses for different platforms (one for TV, one for pay TV and another for streaming) – I’m just not sure they can continue to do business this way in the age of the Internet and with piracy so rampant (exclusivity means nothing when it’s available 2 hours after broadcast on the regular torrent sites).

More on this later in this WNR, but first …

DVDFab’s double trouble this week with the courts, and with Google

Don’t try to trick the court – that’s the lesson to be learnt from the latest ruling in the DVDFab trial. The company that makes the DVD ripping tool was the subject of a rather harsh preliminary injunction last year that saw domain name seized, social media accounts locked up, and online payment accounts frozen.

The company behind DVDFab, Fengtao Software Inc, responded to the injunction by promising to no longer sell their product to US customers. All that was fine, except it appears that unwilling to lose a huge share of their business, the makers of DVDFab tried to bypass the injunction by launching several sites targeting US patrons (sites like BluFab.com, TDMore.com).

When the complainants, AACS LA, got wind of this and notified the court, the court had no other choice but to issue further injunctions against a defendant whose action in continuing to try and sell to US customers, the judge in the case says, can only be classified as “recalcitrant persistence”. As a result, the judge ordered these other domain names seized, and for DVDFab’s new social media accounts, including Twitter account @dvdfabofficial, to be seized. The judge also barred payment processors in the US from working with DVDFab, which makes it almost impossible for DVDFab to do business in the US (and very difficult worldwide).

To make matters worse, Google’s Chrome browser is now listing both the download sites of DVDFab and the download itself as malicious (Firefox and IE downloads are unaffected). This is despite Google owned VirusTotal classifying the file as completely clean.

One possible scenario is that the same download servers used to host the DVDFab files are also hosting actual malicious or adware programs, and that DVDFab has been labelled as such by association.

Update: It appears the block on the download servers and the download itself has been removed, and that it was a false positive or the above described scenario of guilty by association. Google Chrome has been a bit over-active in blocking downloads lately, which I guess is what you have to expect from a search engine/browser maker trying to also be an anti-malware/security company.

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Australia’s new ISP copyright policing regime has already been condemned by consumer groups, but some content holders are still not happy. Apparently, some want further action to be taken against VPNs and geo-unblockers. It seems in their eyes, users who want access and are willing to pay, but not in a way that’s “approved” by rights-holders (to allow them to maximize their profits) are no better than pirates and should be dealt with accordingly.

Netflix wants to make VPNs obsolete by making the same content available everywhere

Netflix, on the other hand, sees it differently. Instead of castigating users that are clearly trying to do the right thing, Netflix wants licensing to be changed so that users will no longer need to use VPNs to get the content they want – a type of global licensing scheme that doesn’t discriminate against users just because they don’t live in the right country.

I understand why content holders want to maximize their profits via regional deals (because they’re greedy), but in this day and age where borders means nothing on the Internet, I find their way of thinking extremely outdated. This kind of wheeling and dealing is also one of the major reasons behind why people choose to pirate, with content locked up in expensive deals, which means higher costs to consumers, taking the content out of the reach of a growing segment of the consuming public. If the costs of piracy are so high, as rights-holders contend all the time, does making a few extra bucks in these kind of licensing deals really worth the cost in rising piracy rates?

And it’s not as if we’re talking about premium content like Game of Thrones – catalog and older titles are subject to the same restrictions, which is why Australia’s Netflix library only contains a fraction of what’s available in the US, despite most of these content being older stuff that nobody is paying for anyway. It’s just short-sighted greed, pure and simple!

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That’s it for this week’s rather short WNR. See you next week.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (29 March 2015)

Weekly News Roundup (22 March 2015)

Sunday, March 22nd, 2015

Hope you’ve had a good week. I’ve been stuck on a similar them lately, having watched the original Robocop, the remake RoboCop and Chappie, all movies with some shared themes. Out of the three, Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop still stands out as the best, while Chappie had its moments too (I’ve seen it described as a Disney movie meeting Verhoeven’s Robocop, and that feels about right) – don’t listen to the critics, Chappie is a very decent movie, up there with District 9, even though I felt that certain aspects of the film, particularly those ripe for philosophical discussion, were glossed over rather too quickly. And Sony, please stop with the product placements – it’s getting far too obvious, and far too annoying (and this comes from someone who just recently purchased a Sony Xperia Z3 smartphone). There’s a good movie hiding inside the remade Robocop, only if it had a better script, and perhaps, if the stories are true, if the director had been allowed to do everything he wanted to do.

Lots to go through, so let’s get started …

Beware of which EZTV domain name you’re using – one of them is no longer under the control of the site’s operators

Those that download a lot of pirated TV shows will most likely be familiar with a site called EZTV – think of it as The Pirate Bay, but mainly for TV shows. For many years, EZTV has been using a .it domain name as its official home. That domain name was seized earlier this year by an Italian domain registrar, forcing the site to move to a .ch domain name.

Now normally that would be the end of the story, but for some reason (and possibly something that may not be entirely legal), the domain registrar put the .it domain name back on the market, and it was subsequently snapped up by someone that had a snapback service on the domain (usually used to take control of recently expired domain names, maybe cause the original registrant forgot to renew in time). The reality now is that the .it domain name is now in the hands of someone that has nothing to do with the real admins of EZTV.

And in typical domain squatter fashion, the .it domain name was pointed back to the real EZTV website. This is done in order to maintain the popularity (and trustworthiness) of the now “hijacked” domain – do this for a while, and people forget that the domain name is no longer owned by the real owners, and this is when the fun begins. Fake pages could then be set up to steal user login info, malware could be distributed in fake torrents, anything could happen – or the new owners could simply be good Samaritans and keep the domain name pointed to the real site.

So if you *have to* use the EZTV website, make sure you don’t use the .it domain name!

The Icelandic Pirate Party has become the country’s most popular political party

If EZTV ever need to relocate to a new domain name, they could try’s .is. Not yet, but maybe a couple of years down the line when the country’s Prime Minister is actually a member of the Pirate Party. This isn’t as far fetched as it sounds, as a recent poll found that the Pirate Party is now the country’s most popular party, beating long term established parties like Independence Party and the Social Democratic Alliance.

It’s a stunning development for a party that’s only two years old, and perhaps shows that the Icelandic voting public is ready for change, and is stick and tired of the status quo, particularly in relation to lopsided copyright laws.

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Time for some more DRM nonsense. How about a light therapy mask with a 30,000 hour LED globe that has been DRM’d to fail after only 7.5 hours? Trying to make a consumable product when there’s no need for one, it would be like printer makers using DRM to make ink cartridges unusable, even when they’re perfectly fine. On second thought, maybe what this light therapy mask company doing isn’t so different after all!

Netflix has been spending a lot on buying and making content

$9.5 billion is a lot of money, and that’s how much Netflix is committed to spend on content purchases over the next few years. The company currently spends around $2 billion a year on third-party content and original productions (which accounts for 20% of their content budget), and leads all other streaming services in terms of content spending.

What’s interesting is that, at least according to Netflix, it’s much better value to spend money on original shows like ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Orange is the New Black’ than buying shows from other networks, at least when it comes to viewer metrics. Netflix deliberately released this information in its last quarterly shareholder letter, no doubt as a warning to third-party content providers (many of whom are also competitors in the field) about the rising cost of content licensing. There’s a mini-boom right now for content holders when it comes to licensing content to streaming providers like Netflix and Amazon, but they should not get too greedy and ruin a good thing for everyone.

Meanwhile, a “God Mode” for Netflix does sound very enticing indeed. While naive me though that a God mode would enable the ability to watch HBO shows on Netflix, but the actual God mode tweak simply allows for multi-row display of titles for those that watch Netflix on their PCs. So nothing as sexy as unlocking the next season of Orange is the new Black months before it’s official release, but still pretty cool for those tired of having to scroll through a single row of content.

In our second public service announcement for this issue, you might want to double check ensure the security settings for your Sony PSN account is in good order, as you might not like what happens if your account does get hacked. One users found out the hard way, when his account was stolen and hackers charged $600 worth of purchases to his account via his linked credit card. Unfortunately, Sony’s policy does not allow for refunds of more than $150, and any other course of action (such as charging back the transactions with his credit card company) could see his PSN account banned and his (intentional) purchases (which, to be fair, wasn’t a whole lot) gone. To make matters worse, it might take up to 6 month for his account to be linked to his PS4 again, as per Sony policy. You can read up on the poor guy’s horror story, and the poor response to the problem from Sony, here on Reddit.

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And so we come to another end of the WNR. Hope you’ve enjoyed this issue, see you next week!

Posted in Copyright, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (22 March 2015)

Weekly News Roundup (15 March 2015)

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

Happy Birthday to me! Yesterday was my birthday, and so today, I’m already 0.00273972602 into my new age. Actually, it’s 0.00273224044 years older because 2016 is a leap year I believe. Nerd!

Quite a bit to get through this week, so let’s get started.

Yes, this is exactly the same as downloading The Walking Dead. Can’t you tell?

Counterfeit drugs that could harm your health or even cause death is the exact same thing as downloading Game of Thrones, according to the U.S. trade office. The USTR wants domain registrars to start cracking down and seizing domain names, all without due process. The USTR even went as far as listing domain registrar Tucows in its “notorious market” list for failing to shut down domain names after receiving information that these domain names were being used to offer content and products that infringe copyright or trademarks. Except these “notifications” have no legal merit or basis, and somehow Tucows is just supposed to take the word of whomever sent these notices and suspend the domain names. I wonder how easy it would be to have mpaa.com suspended, I’m sure they infringe on somebody’s rights if you look closely enough.

The worst part is that the USTR continues to use the same shtick, or rather, it continues to parrot the same line of argument of linking “rat poison filled” counterfeit drugs to movie downloads, both of which are technically copyright or trademark infringement. Show me how you can download rat poison filled counterfeit drugs from The Pirate Bay, and I’ll totally support your plan to allow private companies to suspend any domain name they want just because they want to.

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Here’s an innovative way to cut down on movie piracy – stop releasing movies! That’s the latest plan from India’s Tamil Film Producer’s Council, which hopes that movie pirates will go out of business if there are no new movies to release. That may very well happen, but what’s stop new movie pirates from starting again once the release of new movies restart? Maybe they haven’t thought this through enough …

Australian pirates have moved beyond having to actually pay for pirated discs and whatnot, preferring to download freely (both as in freedom and in price). The industry-led push to toughen anti-piracy measures here in Australia has certainly had a major positive impact – for VPN providers! Australians are flocking to VPN services in order to escape anti-piracy monitors. Well at least somebody well be benefiting financially from these anti-piracy measures – it won’t be the rights holders, that’s for sure!

In this week’s Digital Video/HD news section, we have two new ways to stream movies and TV shows, and one new way which is blocked for Comcast customers.

HBO Now is coming in April, but will you cancel your cable subscription if you sign up?

Starting with the official announcement that HBO’s standalone over-the-top streaming product will now be known as HBO Now, and will be available from April for $14.99 per month. Most of this is not news (other than the April release date), but slightly disappointing will be the fact that for the first three month at least, HBO Now will only be available on Apple devices, no doubt due to “business decisions” made at the highest level (more on these kind of “business decisions” later).

With no international expansion plans for the service yet, it will be interesting to see how hard/easy it would be for people overseas to get access to the service. The VPN/smart DNS thing might not be where the problem is, neither will be getting the app on Apple devices (it’s easy to create a U.S. iTunes account) as it’s the payment method that could get tricky. HBO could easily do a Netflix and allow overseas credit cards without looking too closely (funny how so many people live in the 90210 ZIP code), but they could also be harsh and only accept valid US credit cards. Time will tell.

Even harsher is the fact that PS4 owners using Comcast won’t be able to stream HBO Go despite the release of the app on the game console, due to “business decisions” made by Comcast. Apparently, Comcast and Sony have yet to come to an agreement on the issue, which leaves PS4 HBO subscribers out in the cold. If you ever want a real world example of how the Internet could be ruined by the lack of Net Neutrality, this is it – ISPs having the power to deny you access to something just because they haven’t been paid.

So while HBO Go isn’t available on the latest PS4 consoles, how about Netflix coming to an oldie, but goodie, gaming console? If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to watch Netflix on the NES, wonder no more. Just plug the NES cartridge in, select the episode of House of Cards you’d like to watch, and off you go in all of its 8-bit glory (and don’t let the fact that due to the NES obviously not have Internet access, that everything you see in this video was just a rigged demo, ruin the fun for you). HBO should have a Hack Day as well to make a hack that doesn’t let mass media corporations from telling you how and where you can watch your shows!

Everyone Love Streaming. Well not everyone, but certainly enough people to TV networks start to get worried

Regardless of how you watch Netflix or HBO, one thing is for certain – everyone’s watching it! A new survey from Nielsen shows that 4 in 10 U.S. households are already subscribing to some for of subscription VOD, with 36% of all American households currently using Netflix.

35% of households with broadband still haven’t started using services like Netflix, so there’s definitely room to grow for the likes of Amazon and Hulu Plus, both of which lag behind Netflix in terms of market share (13% and 6.5% respectively). Plus there’s also the quarter of all American homes that do not yet have broadband.

What there is less room to grow is the amount of TV households watch per day, which (although having dropped slightly) is currently at 4 hours and 51 minutes. I don’t think I can manage to squeeze 4 hours and 51 minutes of free time every day from my already fairly lax schedule, so I don’t know how people are doing it!

February NPD results are in, and we’ll discuss it in more detail next week. Suffice to say, it’s business as usual which means the PS4 was on top yet again.

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One year older, one year wiser? Um, probably not. I’d be happy to just be able to maintain my current level of intelligence for as long as possible, and no, that was not my birthday wish. See you next week (when I’ll be +0.0263157895 years older).

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, Gaming, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (15 March 2015)

Weekly News Roundup (8 March 2015)

Sunday, March 8th, 2015

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. We have quite a bit to go through today, everything from a Chinese ’50 Shade of Grey’ to Blu-ray malware. It’s nice to have news stories to write about.

No time to waste, so let’s get started.

50 Shades of Grey – Chinese Style!

Those not wanting to give money to anyone involved with the ’50 Shades of Grey’ phenomenon (book of film), or those that are simply too embarrassed to go see it at the cinema will have been waiting for a good quality pirated version of the film. The morality of illegal downloading aside, the news that a very good quality HD version of the film ripped straight from a legal streaming outlet who had early access to the film will have been received as a piece of very good news indeed. But there’s a catch – this newly uploaded version is the PG-13, censored, airline version of the film, or to be more precisely, the Chinese government approved version of the film.

In other words, it’s the version with all the “good” bits removed, nudity, sex scenes or pretty much the only reason you’d ever even consider watching a film like this. If there’s one Chinese censor approved film this year that you have to watch, this film is not it.

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The sleazy world of political lobbying has been revealed by Google’s lawsuit against the state Attorney General of Mississippi Jim Hood. Hood started an investigation last year to discover whether Google is guilty of helping to distribute copyrighted content, but it was later revealed (ironically via the hacked Sony emails) that the MPAA was the one pulling all the strings, even going as far as creating an astroturf group (the Digital Citizens Alliance) and helping Hood draft letters that the AG was signing and sending to Google. All of this was an attempt by the MPAA to bring back SOPA.

Going back to AG Hood’s original claims, while there is no doubt that you can find pirated content via Google, but you can also find pretty much everything else on Google (um, that’s what a search engine does). It’s like making Yellow Pages responsible for all the actions of every company listed in the phone book.

Google promptly sued Hood to stop his investigation, and this week, a Federal court judged granted a temporary injunction against the investigation. While this is definitely a victory (judges don’t tend to grant temporary injunctions, and may even throw out the case altogether, if there’s nothing backing Google’s claims), it’s only a minor one as this TR only issued to ensures the “status quo”, as the judge puts it. A full trial will still be needed to determine whether Attorney General Hood and his MPAA buddies will get to blame Google for everything that’s wrong with the world today.

The Big cinema chains, AMC, Regal, Cinemark and Carmike, are starting to get increasingly worried about the death of the release window, especially now that Netflix is getting into the movie releasing business in a very serious way this year. Netflix has several first-run movies planned for simultaneous theatrical and streaming release set for this year, including the sequel to ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. The chains, worried that their monopoly on movies released during the typical 90-day release window, are boycotting any film that does not have this exclusive window.

Movie cinema chains have Netflix in their sights

The latest release to get banned is ‘Beasts of No Nation’, starring The Wire’s Idris Elba and directed by True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga, a drama following the tale of a child soldier in Africa. Netflix purchased the rights to the film and will be making it a streaming exclusive when it is released later in the year, but has been seeking a theatrical release for the film that many considers an Oscar contender. With the big cinema chains all boycotting the film, it will be up to the smaller independent chains to pick up the slack, with around 250 screens set to show the film (a drop in the ocean compared to the number of screens owned by the big chains – Regal, the biggest chain, has more than 7,300 screens alone in North America).

So instead of giving viewers the choice between legal streaming and the full theatrical experience, the big chains appear willing to use their market power to maintain their precious release window, not realising that they’d still have to “compete” with another form of free digital movie viewing – piracy.

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A warning for those that download Blu-ray ISOs to burn their own discs, you could be burning a disc that launches malware on any computer, or selected Blu-ray hardware disc players, that plays it. Security consultants have found a vulnerability that allows malicious code to be launched via a Blu-ray movie’s BD-J interactive content. The most obvious attack vector is though the PC based Blu-ray player software PowerDVD, where a flaw in the software allows BD-j applets to run outside of the normal sandboxed environment and access the OS and file systems. Those with hardware Blu-ray players are not immune either, as a second vulnerability allows root access to Blu-ray players when the malicious code is launched.

Congratulations on winnings a 20th Anniversary Edition PS4 … oops, we’ve lost your details, bad luck!

The paper-less, cloud based office is the office of the future. And if this is true, then the office of the future is also where a multinational corporation accidentally erases the list of winners of a high profile, nation wide competition. Sony Japan has accidentally deleted the winners of their much hyped Anniversary edition PS4 competition. With the PlayStation brand entering its 20th year, Sony released a limited edition PS4 that has the same “silver/grey” finish as the original PlayStation console. Japanese consumers who bought a PlayStation console or an approved accessory in December or January received an unique code that could be submitted to Sony to go into the draw to win one of these fabled PS4 consoles, with Sony Japan choosing 123 winners. The only problem? Sony has lost the list of 123 winners “somehow”, and now the winners will have to find their unique code again, or to provide other evidence of their purchase. Sony assures customers that their data has not been stolen. The data has merely been lost with no explanations given. I guess someone should have printed out the list or something.

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That’s all we have for this week. Hope you enjoyed this week’s eclectic collection of news stories, I’m hoping for more of the same next week. Until then, have a good one!

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (8 March 2015)

DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for the ‘Video Technology’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (5 April 2015)

Weekly News Roundup (29 March 2015)

Weekly News Roundup (22 March 2015)

Weekly News Roundup (15 March 2015)

Weekly News Roundup (8 March 2015)

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