January 12, 2009Kordor Electronics Releases Digital Cinema Movie Distribution Technology
Kodor Electronics gives a boost to the digital cinema initiative today with the release of the KodeKey™ Professional Zip Platform for Windows and Mac OS X computer systems. Movie studios are expected to make wide investments in digital cinema upgrades in 2009 following a ten-year research and development period starting with the 1999 digital release of Walt Disney Pictures Bicentennial Man. Digital films are packaged and distributed using an industry standard specification called the Digital Cinema Package (DCP). Part of the DCP specification is the digital film MXF container that can range in single file sizes of 60GB to 500GB. Today, digital films are delivered by hard drive or satellite data transmission using fulfillment services from companies like Technicolor, Kodak, and Deluxe. Legacy celluloid reel manufacturing and distribution costs movie studios up to $1500 a print per theater. Digital distribution provides a dramatic drop in initial distribution investment for movie studios but has proven to be a bit costly due to hard drive delivery and expensive satellite rental time. The cost savings reserved from digital versus celluloid distribution is planned for investments into digital projector upgrades for theater vendors by the movie studios. Delivering a system with an average per film distribution cost of $70, the KodeKey Zip technology is an online powered zip format that replaces the internal data storage of a traditional zip file with the cloud storage infrastructure of the Amazon Web Services S3 platform. By using an upload and download manager, the format can manage hundreds of gigabytes of data in a zip file less than 1 kilobyte in size per movie. Optionally, the format can create 1,344,000-bit password certificates to add additional access protection as an accessory to KDM encryption keys sent to theater vendors to unlock playback rights for MXF containers. Broadband delivery of digital films has been a challenge in the past due to poor TCP connections and poor designs of online storage servers required to handle single file sizes above 5GB. KodeKey Zip has been tested and approved for up to 1TB of single file archiving validated by rigorous 12-mode hash string calculation certification. "KodeKey Zip has been designed to easily deliver 300GB digital films as an e-mail attachment to thousands of theaters simultaneously", says inventor and Chairman William G. Blanchard, "We are honored to work with the digital film initiative and look forward to provide support to the digital movie industry worldwide." More information about the KodeKey Zip system can be found at http://www.kodekey.com
Posted by musicdish on 01/12/2009 11:42 AM Comments (0)
November 17, 2008Fighting the Good Copyfight
Some of you who know me better know me as a pirate. Not the
rum-swilling, fancy coat wearing type (though also applicable) and not
just the file copying variety but a full fledged Pirate Movement
member. A philosophical pirate if you will. And the pirate movement
is a real movement. It's not just a bunch of people who want things
for free and take them. Those are called anarchists. Pirates of the
cultural and political breed have a purpose behind their actions. And
in this case it's about fighting to take back culture. But let's start
with some history. Copyright, in it's modern incarnation, started with the Statute of Anne in 1709. This gave exclusive copying and reproduction writes to printed works to the authors of said work, instead of publishers. These rights were limited to 14 after publication. After that all works went into the public domain. This act changed the copyright game in two ways.
The really short version of history after this can be put into a few eras. After this publishing companies and eventually movie studios actually wanted copyright to expire as soon as possible. Shocking, no? The reason is the faster things went into public domain the faster these places could reprint or film adaptations of a work. It wasn't uncommon for movie studios to film recent plays from other countries because it took longer for anyone to notice copyright infringement had occurred. When film was a new medium Edison held all the patents on it. Well, a bunch of industry speculators decided to go far enough west that no one could touch them on piracy and use Edison's methods to make competing studios to Edison's own Black Mariah. These people went so far west the got to California and founded Hollywood. Once communication grew to the point that simply moving far away couldn't stop people from noticing copyright infringement these producers and distributors of media realized that there was more money to be had in owning rights than in stealing them. If they couldn't make money from stealing other people's works then they could make money be ensuring no one stole from them. So producers became right owners. At this point, when it became more lucrative to own rights, sudden;y legislation started popping up to extend copyright lifespans. At the forefront of this modern pro-copyright fight has been Disney. Originally the character of Mickey Mouse was supposed to become public domain sometime in the mid 80s but they passed a law to extend rights until the early 2000s. Then when that came close they pushed through more law so that now he's owned until 2019 (although there is some evidence that the Steamboat Willy version of Mickey Mouse is public domain ). This is all very ironic since Disney has been screwed out of their first mascot by bad copyright choices as well as basing most of their famous movies on public domain stories while still having yet to contribute anything back to the public domain. When modern copyright first started it gave the creator rights for 14 years starting at the date of publication. Now works can be held by the production company for 94 years after the death of the creator. This is particularly distressing when you realize that the original goal of copyright (starting with the Statute of Anne) was to encourage people to write so that the public domain could expand. At the time there was no long tail market so 14 years as an acceptable lifespan of a written work. When the US colonies adopted similar law they did so with the idea of creating a thriving intellectual marketplace. That is irony. History lesson over. Contemporary lesson begins. Now that you have all that in context perhaps you can see what pirates are fighting for. And by pirates I don't just mean file copiers. I mean people who want ideas to be free after a reasonable commercial life. People who see expanding legislation as a protective measure not just for companies but against citizens. Pirates and copyfighters (copyright fight) are locked in a conflict over culture. Can you imagine if fairy-tales were still copyrighted? Disney would be nothing. Because of both real and perceived copyright laws people are now being told at drugstores that they cannot make enlargements of 100 year old family portraits. Hell, there are cases where photo counter workers are in such fear that they refuse to make copies of photos that the customer has taken because they might be professional. It's strange how fear has always ruled the modern copyright industry, because copyright is now a moneymaking industry on it's own, though copying technology has almost always led to improved production for these same fearful tyrants of rights. VCRs were fought when they first came out. Movie companies feared it would be the end of theaters. If you could watch a movie whenever you wanted at home, copied even, then no one would pay to see them ever again. And now we have an enormous and thriving home movie market that rivals that of theaters but still pays the production companies. They're reaping the benefits from two markets, one (movie production) was based on copyright infringement and the other (home theaters) they fought tooth and nail out of fear. The same thing happened with audio cassettes. And let's not forget Napster. MP3s are encoded using a method that was made for compressing the audio tracks on DVDs. Someone took that software (piracy) and made a method of encoding CDs (piracy). Today iTunes and self-publishing albums have shifted the consumer music market, making more distribution and production cheaper, creating a more versatile product and making the end result both more lucrative to make and cheaper to buy. Yet all of this started with piracy and the music industry is still throwing tantrums about this technology. Still not fully accepted but getting there is the home-brew game industry. You can see this by the Wiiware market and the XBox arcade where you can purchase games made by regular people. On previous systems you had to violate warranty and possibly law to modify systems play these types of games. The pattern throughout the history of copyright and advancement seems to be this:
Star Wars
Yes, Star Wars fits this same format, though on a much smaller scale.
Lucas made Star Wars, a great set of movies. Think of that as the
market: Star Wars is a market. Well, to "improve" upon it he made the
special editions. Han shoots first and the fans rebel. There was such
an outcry that VHS and even Laserdisc rips started making the rounds.
Fans wanted Han as a scoundrel and there was to be no ghost of Hayden
Christensen at the end of Return of the Jedi! Lucas saw this and
eventually re-re-re-released the movies on DVD with both the special
version as well as the original. The end result is more money to him
and a better product back to the fans. Piracy can be used as tool to
fill in gaps for supply and demand. And historically piracy either
made up a small portion of consumers or evolved into a whole industry
on it's own.
At this point in time the MPAA and RIAA have a guilty until proven innocent mentality. They champion enforcement over innovation even at the expense of their consumer base and product quality. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is used as a blanket buzz-word to scare people. That is the act that makes breaking copy protection a violation regardless of whether the user/owner has the right to the copy protected material. That's like buying a house but then having to pay a toll at the doorway to each room you want to enter. That's called bullshit. It forces regular consumers to become criminals just to use the items they have purchased. Maybe that means these laws that were meant to protect creators and enhance the public domain have strayed a little far from acceptable. Out of fear Canadian law makers are claiming that bittorrent should be illegal but that's tantamount to saying the internet is legal but HTTP is not. Artists are seeing less return on their music while producers see more at the same time that fans are being sued on the artist's behalf. And that is what pirates and copyfighters are trying to fix. By keeping the innovative side piracy alive we're pushing at laws and technology to help everyone enjoy their purchases more which in turn leads to more purchases. There are things we're doing with media that we'd gladly pay for except no one offers it as a product. I copy multi-DVD sets to my media center PC so I can watch season of shows at a time. I trade movies and series online that have never been released to the public or even aired on TV. I pull the DRM off audio books not to save money (they're library copies) but so I can put them on an iPod or my iRiver because the Microsoft DRM no longer works after I put an open source operating system on my MP3 player. I sometimes download digital comics because I can then, under Fair Use, use the images to do illustrated reviews which in turn can increase buyer numbers. It's not about stealing. It's about improving the world. US copyright was supposed to be a tool to encourage creators to add to the public domain by giving them rights for the main lifetime of their works. Now copyright is a battle between consumers and options-holders while the creators are mostly pushed to the sidelines. No one benefits from that situation except for middlemen right holders. That's not how our idyllic intellectual market should work. I hope that helps clarify why pirates aren't just thieves as well as why consumers are becoming thieves out of necessity. It's a complicated battleground, part of it based in the court systems and part of it in the underground digital market. And guess what: I want to help everyone out on this rickety ground. So I'm going to start up a series of blogs called This Digital Life. I'll be telling you how to do things with technology that are (most likely) free and (hopefully) useful. I'll tell you how to get a poor man's push-mail so you know when people have sent you mail without a computer or fancy phone at hand. I'll show you how to create a free "personal assistant" to send you e-mail, twitters and texts to remind you to do things and keep track of your schedule, as well as take notes and remember things for you. Oh, and it's run by e-mail or voice. And because this all came to me over this copyfight article the first installment will tell you how to skip over Tivo, Hulu and commercials to get TV delivered to you. All the shows you want, anywhere you want, the same day as they air. For free. And it's (pretty) legal. But to cap off this post here are some link you might want to go through to get more information on all of this as well as jump into the underground legal-illegal world of being a consumer. A great episode of the Canadian radio show Ideas entitled "Who Owns Ideas?" Grab it while you can because their web site says: "The Best of Ideas podcast is updated every Monday. Please note: podcasts are archived for 4 weeks only. Due to copyright restrictions not all Ideas programs are available for podcast." But don't worry. Since I downloaded it to my computer I have a copy I can share if it's rotated off the site. Just let me know you need it.
The Pirate's Dilemma While at times a bit heavy handed or hokey this is still a great source to explain the copyfight landscape and get some historical background from real examples. When you go to purchase it you can name any price, even $0 if that's all you can afford. Buy it for free and then pay for a second copy if you love it. Do take note of the self-defeating copyright notice inside the book and revel in the irony. Revel! FairUse4WM This nifty little program will let you convert DRMed WMA and WMV media files to unprotected files. This only works on media you have the licence to access. Also, Microsoft stopped fighting the guy who made this. This will let you free media you already have the right to from the following sources:
DVD Shrink
This will let you take a DVD and re-encode it. You can shrink DVDs
down to fit on a single layer DVD even if the original is dual layer
and too big. The up sides to this are letting you take off audio
languages you don't want/need as well as making the copy region free so
you can get foreign DVDs to work on your DVD player. See, another
market demand that was put in place by distributors to provide more
licencing fees to them and an inferior product to you.
DVD Decrypter Oh no! The DVD you want to make region free is copy protected and DVD Shrink can't help you out! Never fear. This will analyze the protection scheme and create an image that you can then re-process in DVD Shrink or any other DVD program. RipIt4Me Some studios are getting tricky and creating dead regions on DVDs so while DVD players don't notice them computers do and get hung up. It's literally media made faulty. This is yet another program that actually runs on top of DVD Decrypter that will drop out these dead spots and intentional disc errors. It actually fixes media that was made faulty on purpose. That's all for now. Keep an eye out for the first in the This Digital Life series. If there's anything you've heard of that you want to know how to do, drop me a line about it. If there's something that you want but don't know if it can be done, let me know as well. I'll be looking for topics to address and will keep the series of how-to's going as long as i have ideas and requests. Next time - free high quality commercial free TV that you can have delivered to your computer. Related Groups:
Buzznet Originals, Who Watches The Watchmen?
Posted by bulletproofheeb on 11/17/2008 10:14 AM Comments (3)
October 1, 2008Netflix makes some changes and I'm just waiting for the world to noticeSo an interesting development has happened with Netflix. Yes, they released their API which is awesome and means software developers out there will now be rolling out custom Netflix programs across all platforms, but that's not the big news that broke. The other thing Netflix announced is that they have made a deal with Starz Play. And this is where it gets really interesting. Starz Play is a streaming/download service from the Starz cable channel. It isn't a Netflix competitor but rather a Starz station alternative. They have a much smaller selection of movies availible, about 1,000. What Starz will do is roll their selection by keeping the most recent movies up and knocking off the back end. When a new movie is made available to Starz they'll knock off movie 1,000, push everything down and make the new release movie number 1. For $7.99 you can get a Starz Play subscription through Netflix, or get all of Netflix (watch now and disc service) for $8.99 so I'm not sure of the logic in that. What this means for regular Netflix subscribers is that you now have 783 new streaming titles available as of this morning and another 1,500 titles scheduled from Starz by the end of the year. Many of these are new releases like Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Spiderman 3 and Superbad. So far this has just sounded like a Netflix press release so let me tell you what the game changing factor is here. People with Netflix, for all practical purposes, now have access to a premium cable station regardless of their cable subscription. If you have basic cable from any provider but also a Netflix subscription then you have a cable station. Even if you don't have cable at all you still have a cable station. That, along with the Netflix deals with ABC, NBC and the Disney Channel, mean that your cable subscription is fast becoming obsolete. Sure, you could always use bittorrent on sites like EZTV.it and avoid cable all together but this is the first move, from a unambiguously 100% unambiguously legal perspective, to have cable content without cable. Between Hulu, Netflix streams and Comcast's Fancast you can watch most network TV shows the day after they air, in HD, on demand. Without any sort of TV service. The fact that this is rushing in on the heels of Comcast instilling a 260 gig/month bandwidth limit is both exciting and problematic. The reason is that the trade off between this increase TV over the internet is that it takes a lot of data transfer. Speed is no longer the issue, with most people now running residential cable connections instead of dial-up. The issue is managing all of that data traffic. Comcast's response is to cap connections to avoid the tubes being tied. Other providers offer tiered service by having the customer pay by usage. Still, this is great for consumers. Instead of a “get what you pay for” service people are now offered a “pay for what you take” service. Only pay for the bandwidth you use and only pay per channel that you want. It's the equivalent of not paying for food by what you take home, but rather paying for what you use. That extra half gallon of milk that you poured out and never drank? On the house. But you wanted more steak this week? Pay for that instead. Only want 3 movies from Starz instead of the whole channel this month? Then you just pay the bandwidth for those movie and not for the cable service. Just want to catch up on Best Week Ever and Heroes? Then cut off your cable subscription and catch those on the net, paying only for those. While this is all great, it's a new market structure that neither the cable providers nor the stations have yet grasped. If I had to guess, I'd say the stations will catch on right before the cable providers but I have no idea when. What you're seeing right now is a couple of policies mixing and neither group noticing.
On one hand you have TV stations clawing for more audience numbers with online services. I only watch Simpsons on Hulu.com during my lunch break but since Fox wants those numbers they've legitimized internet TV in exchange for being able to count viewers. Instead of just counting watchers for a show the night it airs many places are counting that plus online and Tivo views within 3 days. This will eventually move to 2 exasperate but equally important markets: pure time-shifting online watchers (raises hand) and regular TV audiences. The other policy is that of the internet providers fighting to control their bandwidth usage and attempt to curb P2P. Comcast previously had an unspeakable, invisible cap for their “unlimited” internet plan. After being charged by the FCC they changed it to a public 260 gig/month. This usage limit is what is mixing with the internet viewer scramble and where it mixes is where this new market will be won and lost. In essence you now have content providers and service providers become consumers. A TV station (Fox, NBC, HBO) can now choose how they want their content spread; internet, cable, torrent, iTunes. At the same time you have service providers with a new choice about what to provide. If any cable provider wanted, they could drop all TV signal and focus on the internet. While that sounds like they'd be limiting their market they could easily throw in a Netflix subscription and a Netflix set-top box (the API is public now, remember?) as part of their service the way Comcast currently provides MacCaffey antivirus subscriptions to their subscribers. This would let them focus their money and resources in one specific direction while still offering what people want. And for anyone who is complaining about watching all this on their computer instead of their nice TV, since Netflix has a public API anyone can make a set-top box to play SD and HD streams on their TV from Netflix, Hulu and other sites. That's what we do at my place. Ok, that was a lot to take in. What does it all mean? Well, for now it means that all you TV watchers have lots of options and to the few of you tech-savvy viewers you have little or no need to ever look at a TV schedule again. For you less savvy folks it means that in the future (not too far off) you wont need to look at a schedule. You just need to wait until the TV stations and the cable providers realize this. Because technology isn't as good as the cutting edge of technology; it's only as good as the cutting edge of usable technology. Related Groups:
Buzznet Secret Cinema, Watchers United
Posted by bulletproofheeb on 10/01/2008 3:14 PM Comments (7)
June 1, 2008HALP!-And a message about messagesMy stupid computer refuses to load Youtube videos. Like, it'll play the first 50 seconds of a 10 minute movie, and then I ccan drag the dot thingy farther along the bar and it'll play some more, but it won't play the whole video. And it's been like this for like...a few months, about a week after I got my computer, but it does the same thing with my desktop computer as well. *cries* I want to watch the interveiw with Lyn-Z with Briget (tasteittv) but it refuses to play!!! Buzznet videos play fine for the most part, one of John's 365 vids won't play...but EVERY youtube vid is a bitch.
I know you people are geniuses out there.
Help me?
Please?
And also, if you've sent me a message through BN in the past few days, I'm sorry for not replying...everytime I check my inbox it says 0 messages even if it said I had a message. And usually the message will be in teh inbox anyway, but this time they aren't so I can't veiw them. :( If it's something important..or funny, or you just want to talk to me, email me at angelcrossmarie@aol.com
Posted by "I enjoy the way Carlton dances." on 06/01/2008 2:58 AM Comments (9)
March 20, 2008The Classic Penguin Blogging at LogicTV!I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm writing for a gadgets website: Check it out for all the latest cutting edge technology news!!
Posted by joshua on 03/20/2008 11:48 AM Comments (6)
November 16, 2007ATTENTION: Please read if your browser was hijacked my MalWare!
FINALLY!!! We know what happened:
Click here to read the story. It really wasn't us. (See, I wasn't lying.) It was a bunch of douchebag hackers fucking with DoubleClick. (Which we use for our ads.) Moral of the story: Buy a Mac, because I was never infected. NEENER.
Posted by PanasonicYouth on 11/16/2007 7:52 PM Comments (45)
November 12, 2007Win £3,000 worth of Roland gear
To get more information on launch date, go to www.musicradar.com now
and leave us your email address. It takes seconds, and if you register on launch you'll give yourself a chance of winning £3,000 worth of Roland gear. So, what are you waiting for?
Posted by musicradar on 11/12/2007 4:02 AM Comments (0)
November 5, 2007geekBUZZ 11.05.07 Google announces development of it's new open platform for mobile phones, Android and the forces of the Open Handset Alliance that are backing it. Wondering how Manga took over the U.S.? Take a look! Halo 3 and it's gaming suicide bombing trends. T-mobile tradmarking the color MAGENTA?! Wow. 300lb water balloon galore!
Posted by mightymendoza on 11/05/2007 9:53 AM Comments (0)
June 20, 2007Warning: Reformatting a hard drive could cost billions!
I just happened upon a news story that I apparently overlooked. It's now 3 months old, but it's still fascinating.
Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing information for an account worth $38 billion (€29 billion). That is what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account — one of Alaska residents' biggest perks — and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.... [the full story]
Posted by angrykeyboarder on 06/20/2007 7:27 AM Comments (0)
May 31, 2007Hey, Pervert: Google Is Watching Your Back It used to be that only around Christmastime did boys and girls need to worry about an all-seeing, seemingly benevolent commercial interest (talkin' 'bout Santa) watching to see if we'd been good or we'd been bad. Now, thanks to the omniscient Google Maps, every day is one of relentless, heartless, intrusive scrutiny. In a feat of technology that is simultaneously amazing and terrifying, the Internet's most ambitious search engine has upgraded their mapping service. Users can zoom in on a neighborhood with enough clarity and precision to see through windows, recognize faces and read license plates. Cyber-stalking is slithering toward a whole new reality. A creep won't even have to leave the keyboard to follow the prey. And if creep does leave keyboard, all the other pervs online will be there as witnesses. Google Maps: Big Brother? Cool Tech?Does giving anyone with Internet access the ability to peer into their neighbors' windows make the world creepier or more fun?
Posted by poxline on 05/31/2007 11:40 AM Comments (15)
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