Multimedia, AV Archive

Thanks to a provision in the 1976 Copyright Act, U.S. law allows the first purchaser of copyrighted material (a book, CD, etc) to subsequently re-sell that item without the copyright owner's consent. In this age of online distribution and the budding, halting attempts at legitimizing it, is the the right to re-sell going to be upheld?

According to Leo Laporte of TechTV, Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) is considering selling his technology television channel which he bought it from Ziff-Davis in 2000. Two candidates are Viacom or Sony. Some people who think this is a bad idea have set up a petition at Petition Online.com.

In response to Adobe's decision to drop the Mac version of Premiere, Apple now offers a trade-in program to entice Premiere users to move to Final Cut Pro/Express. If Adobe users trade in their disks with Apple, they will receive a free copy of Final Cut Express, or a $500 rebate for Final Cut Pro. In other Apple multimedia news, Apple released Soundtrack for $299, a music composing application.

Motherboard audio has sounded awful for a long time. But over the last few years, it has improved steadily. It's still not ready to replace the best PCI sound cards, but based on ExtremeTech's extensive testing, it might just work for you.

At last year's meeting of Apple shareholders, Steve Jobs was asked about videoconferencing and what it meant to Apple. "Stay tuned," he said. Sources now say that Apple is on the verge of offering videoconferencing functionality to users with an upgrade to its iChat software. Sources confirmed to Think Secret that the next version of iChat, code-named "Viceroy," will feature videoconferencing built-in. Additionally, the new iChat will reportedly boast support for a number of other IM protocols. Our Take: I hope that Apple will also feature support for my Creative WebCam PRO, a $40 camera, which is an extremely popular buy (well supported on Linux as well) but has no drivers for OSX so far.

"It's too bad 97 percent of you will have to wait until the end of the year to check out Apple's new iTunes Music Store. It flat out rocks!" Read the article at KnoxNews.

Jamie Zawinski wrote an editorial regarding the status of video playback under Linux (note: strong language is used). My take: The guy is my hero (he could use better language though). This is exactly the status of usability on Linux, and not just with video players...

Linux got its first big Hollywood break in 1997 when Venice, California studio Digital Domain (D2) used Linux to render the special effects for the hit movie Titanic. LinuxJournal spoke with D2 while they were in production using Linux with Star Trek: Nemesis, which has a scheduled US release date of December 13, 2002. D2 uses Linux for both renderfarm servers and artist desktops.

Recently I decided that it would be a good idea for me to convert several old home videos from VCR tape to a digital format. I knew enough about video capturing/editing to have a basic idea of the hardware requirements, but regarding software (editing/converting), I didn’t really know where to start. This article is for anyone who is interested in working with digital video, but isn’t sure how to get started.

Bill Gates unveils Windows Media 9, after nearly four years of development at a cost of about $500 million. It challenges RealNetworks for digital dominance.

The technical effects studio has switched from using RISC-Unix workstations from SGI to using Intel-based Dell systems running Linux for the bulk of its animation and special effects work, said Cliff Plumer, ILM's chief technology officer. As part of the conversion, ILM recently deployed 600 Pentium 4 workstations. "The Intel workstations that were deployed were probably 20 percent of the price of SGI workstations we bought a few years ago," Plumer said. "Performance-wise, they are about three times as fast." Read the report at News.com.

Audacity is a multitrack/recording free audio editor. It started a few years back as a simple sound editor, but since then it has evolved in a powerfull modern editor, by supporting multi-track recording. The stable 1.0 version was released only a few days ago.

The surprising truth about Disney's 1982 computer-game sci-fi film, Tron, is that it's still visually impressive (though technologically quaint by later high-definition standards) and a lot of fun. Tron was the first movie to use CGI (computer generated graphics & special effects) incorporated into the normal film. To celebrate 20 years of the breakthrough in both Hollywood's and computer's standards, Disney has released the "Tron - 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition" DVD with 5 hours of extra material on the making of the classic movie.

The weekend is ahead and the day of relaxing from coding furiously all week, should also be near. Given that most OS coders love sci-fi, here are some sci-fi movie and TV news: One of the most highly anticipated new sci-fi series, a revival of 70s cult classic Battlestar Galactica, has been shelved after director Bryan Singer jumped ship to direct 'X-Men 2'.