Multimedia, AV Archive

Popcorn Time is so good at movie piracy, it’s scary

Thom Holwerda 2014-03-11 Multimedia, AV 46 Comments

One thing that iTunes, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have proven is that content makers can fight piracy by providing a better, easier service to paying customers. But what happens when piracy fights back with something just as convenient?

A new app called Popcorn Time raises that very question. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, Popcorn Time lets you stream the latest movies - including American Hustle, Gravity and Frozen - with just a couple clicks. The software uses BitTorrent to find and download movies, but eliminates the usual hassle of wading through sketchy torrent sites and waiting for the file to finish downloading.

Basically, it's the version of Netflix that you've always wanted - and maybe have been willing to pay extra for - but that Hollywood may never allow. It's also a flagrant enabler of copyright violation, at least in the United States.

It's the perfect product for movie lovers. It has a super-simple interface, completely abstracts Torrents away, works on the three major desktop platforms, and with one click and just a few minutes of waiting, you're watching a high-quality movie streamed through BitTorrent.

The entertainment industry could have built this years ago. Except, they were too busy suing the shit out of the very people they should have been serving to realise all the technology they needed already existed. Had the entertainment industry not been the only industry in the world that is protected by a huge, special legal framework, they would have been forced to innovate much sooner - and they most likely would have built this a decade ago.

Submitted by drcoldfoot 2013-10-30 Multimedia, AV 57 Comments

Remember the whole H.264 thing? Cisco just solved it for us - more or less.

The industry has been divided on the choice of a common video codec for some time, namely because the industry standard - H.264 - requires royalty payments to MPEG LA. Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco is making a bold move to take concerns about these payments off the table.

We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.

Cisco will release the code of its H.264 codec under the BSD license, and will also make binaries available for just about every possible platform. Cisco will pay all the licensing costs - over the coming decade, this will cost them a whopping $65 million, illustrating just how expensive H.264 is, and how unrealistic it was to expect it to become a standard without a free implementation being available for everyone to use. It has to be noted that both end users and developers can make use of this.

Mozilla has already announced it will implement this codec into Firefox. All this is great, but it doesn't really address the issue in the long term - the next generation of codecs is coming, and once they arrive, this whole process starts all over again. Will another sugar daddy step up by that time?

Google called the MPEG-LA’s bluff, and won

Thom Holwerda 2013-03-10 Multimedia, AV 79 Comments

A few days ago, Google and the MPEG-LA announced that they had come to an agreement under which Google received a license for techniques in VP8 that may infringe upon MPEG-LA patents (note the 'if any'). Only a few days later, we learn the real reason behind Google and the MPEG-LA striking a deal, thanks to The H Open, making it clear that the MPEG-LA has lost. Big time. Update: Chris Montgomery: "The wording suggests Google paid some money to grease this along, and the agreement wording is interesting but make no mistake: Google won. Full stop."

Sony to make last MiniDisc stereo system in March

Thom Holwerda 2013-02-04 Multimedia, AV 38 Comments

"Sony has announced it is to deliver its last MiniDisc stereo next month. It marks an end to the firm's support for the system which it launched in 1992. The format only ever had limited success outside of Japan and was ultimately doomed by the rise of recordable CDs and MP3 players." My format of choice for personal audio up until a few years ago, when the rest of the world had already long moved on to MP3. Nothing beats the satisfying sound of closing a portable MiniDisc player/recorder with a disc in it.

Compact disc turns 30

Thom Holwerda 2012-10-02 Multimedia, AV 60 Comments

"On October 1 1982, Joel's sixth studio album, 52nd Street, was the first commercially released CD album... Which means CDs are 30-years-old today. It's worth noting here that 52nd Street wasn't a new album - it was launched initially in 1978, but it was selected for relaunch on the new digital audio disc, rolling out alongside the first CD player - the Sony CDP-101 - in Japan. But of course, the CD didn't spring up overnight - the road to launch started long before 1982." I'm still 100% CD when it comes to music. The act of physically holding a new album in your hands for the first time and gently placing the disk in the tray can't be matched by pressing a download button behind a computer.

Guest post by Hiev 2012-09-27 Multimedia, AV 1 Comment

"So this news is a couple of days old now, but I wanted to write a blog entry about the exciting release of GStreamer 1.0. When we released GStreamer 0.10 about 7 years ago we did not expect or plan the 0.10 series to last as long as it did, I think if we had it would have been called 1.0 instead of 0.10. Our caution back then was that 0.10 was a quite revolutionary version with the core of GStreamer extensively re-designed around effective use of threads and thread safety."

XBMC for Android announced

Thom Holwerda 2012-07-14 Multimedia, AV 39 Comments

"We have been keeping a little secret.... The kind that is so much fun to share when the time comes. Today we announce XBMC for Android. Not a remote, not a thin client; the real deal. No root or jailbreak required. XBMC can be launched as an application on your set-top-box, tablet, phone, or wherever else Android may be found." So, this just made Google TV useful, right?

A walk-through on digital collages

Eugenia Loli 2012-06-01 Multimedia, AV 8 Comments

Following our recent interview with the iPhone collage artist _meta_, a few readers asked for more such articles. So here's one on how to create your own such digital collages! Technically-speaking, digital collage, illustrations, and photo-montage are the same thing. It's just pictures or drawings put together in a single image, made look like a seamless, coherent piece. However, there are distinct differences in the way these are perceived and enjoyed, they essentially are different sub-genres.

Who’s pirating Game of Thrones, and why?

Thom Holwerda 2012-05-21 Multimedia, AV 61 Comments

"With over 3 million downloads per episode, the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is without doubt the most pirated TV-show of the season. Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that most of the pirates come from Australia, while London tops the list of pirate cities. But why have these people turned to BitTorrent?" Because in order to get it legally, I have to take a monthly subscription costing me â‚¬15 per month. So instead, I buy the season box sets as they come out, and download them every Monday morning in the meantime.

DVDs, Blu-rays will carry two unskippable government warnings

Thom Holwerda 2012-05-09 Multimedia, AV 53 Comments

"Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes. An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will 'come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through.'" That'll surely teach the pirates who don't buy DVDs or Blu-rays.

Fiona Apple’s new single: “Every single night”

Thom Holwerda 2012-04-23 Multimedia, AV 33 Comments

This is kind of a big deal for me. No, this shouldn't be on OSNews, and no, at this particular moment, I really don't care that you're right about that. All our silly stupid pointless discussions about Windows iPhone Galaxies and patents and whatnot - no matter how angry it sometimes makes me, how much energy I spend on it - it all becomes so trivial and meaningless the moment I realise this beautiful world still produces things like this. I'm going to enjoy the sunshine for a moment. And I'm leaving my phone on vibrate in the kitchen.

Top-five tips to animate your comics

Eugenia Loli 2012-04-20 Multimedia, AV 23 Comments

I recently delved into the world of hand-drawn comics-style animation, after a lifetime of just sketching on paper. While I have a long experience with video editing, I had no experience with video animation of that kind. When I first got the idea to do the video it felt like a mountain to me, excessively complex. But the steep learning curve got easier with time. This is my top-5 cheat list to get you up and running.

Submitted by fsmag 2012-04-20 Multimedia, AV 30 Comments

"When I started working on a no-DRM, open-standards-based solution for distributing high-definition video on fixed media ('Lib-Ray'), I naturally thought of Theora, because it was developed as a free software project. Several people have suggested, though, that the VP8 codec would be a better fit for my application. This month, I've finally gotten the necessary vpxtools and mkvtoolnix packages installed on my Debian system, and so I'm having a first-look at VP8. The results are very promising, though the tools are somewhat finicky."

XBMC 11.0 released

Thom Holwerda 2012-03-25 Multimedia, AV 6 Comments

"XBMC 11.0 Milestones include Addon Rollbacks, vast improvements in Confluence (the default skin), massive speed increases via features like Dirty-region rendering and the new JPEG decoder, a simpler, better library, movie set scraping, additional protocol handling, better networking support, better handling of unencrypted BluRay content and structures, adjustable display refresh rate in OSX (to match the already available feature in Windows and Linux), AirPlay support, an upgraded weather service with geoip lookup, and much, much more. Check out the highlights in the summarized changelog."

United, a tech conglomerate can take over Hollywood

Eugenia Loli 2012-03-14 Multimedia, AV 67 Comments

By reading various media news in the last year or so, a very disturbing pattern appeared. When media providers like Amazon, Apple, Google, Netfix, Microsoft tried to license content off of Hollywood, they were either given extremely high prices, or they were being rejected altogether. Microsoft even canceled a finished XBoX360-related video product recently because they couldn't license content easily, Netflix is given harder and harder time as time goes by (notice how only a few good movies were added to their streaming service in the last few months), and even the almighty Apple had the door shut on its face numerous times.

TV is even more broken in The Netherlands

Thom Holwerda 2012-02-24 Multimedia, AV 115 Comments

An interesting anecdote at MinimalMac about television being broken. The author's young daughter, who is growing up in a Netflix/Hulu/iTunes/etc. household, was confronted with actual TV for the first time, and wonders why she can't pick what to watch, why the shows are being interrupted all the time, and so on. Clearly - TV is broken.

Flash Player for Linux becomes Pepper-only

Submitted by Ajeet 2012-02-22 Multimedia, AV 102 Comments

On my mark... Get set... Start not caring! Adobe has announced it plans to discontinue the stand-alone Flash Player for Linux, instead focussing all its effort on the version available through the Pepper API - which, besides Chrome, no one else is going to support.

VLC 2.0 ‘Twoflower’ released

Thom Holwerda 2012-02-19 Multimedia, AV 54 Comments

VLC 2.0 has been released. "With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC. Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental). Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use. Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers."

Boxee 1.5 for Desktops Arrives, but the End Is Nigh

David Adams 2011-12-27 Multimedia, AV 21 Comments

Boxee released version 1.5 of its free multimedia streaming software for Mac, Windows, and Linux desktops today, but simultaneously announced that it will cease offering the Boxee desktop software after January 2012. Thereafter, the company will limit its focus to devices such as the D-Link Boxee Box.

Logitech CEO: Google TV “Cost us Dearly”

Thom Holwerda 2011-11-11 Multimedia, AV 24 Comments

"Yesterday, Logitech hosted an Analyst and Investor Day and during his remarks, CEO Guerrino De Luca pulled absolutely no punches in describing the 'mistakes' the company made with its Logitech Revue Google TV set top box. Calling the company's Christmas 2010 launch 'a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature', De Luca told investors that the company had 'brought closure to the Logitech Revue saga' by making plans to let inventory run out this quarter and that there are 'no plans to introduce another box to replace Revue'."