Archive for the 'Music' category

Simply the best video player for Windows, VLC, just quit its long beta phase. This is official now, VLC v1.0.0 is available with a list of small improvements brought to an already impressive product that I can only recommend if you are using video (to read DVD, BluRay, HD-DVD discs; to stream videos from your computer; to convert your videos; and I sure forget some).

Free ad for friends in concert in Paris in a few weeks.

Gabriela Ungureanu / Anne-Elisabeth Halpern - Schubert

Schubert Concert on Sunday 24 May 2009 @ 12h30.

We all love when things come free to us. Here I found a treasure trove of movies that are free to download. Legally.

Thanks to the Canadians of the National Film Board of Canada. They give us feature-length movies, documentaries, animated short movies. Everything, of the best quality, at the best price: Free.

We do not often see the sceenplay of a movie we like. Maybe it’s fortunate because they are hardly exhilarating except when they come from Alfred Hitchcock (the man was a maniac of detailed preparation) or when they describe all about animation movies.

The Wall, the Alan Parker movie created with the eponymous music album from Pink Floyd stays a monument of moving images. But, now, you can look at the pages of Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe, the original screenplay (in PDF).

Some musical scores are really out-of-this world:

• One musical score drawing up the map of the whole world:

Play Song

Buy Song: World Beat Music

• PI, the mathematical constant, can easily be transformed into a curious musical score may be honoring the memory of Bach and Pythagoras:

• But I really love the work of Atushi Ojisama:

Nothing is for sure, but Wired has an article about this issue: paying a monthly fee to have fully legal access to unlimited music download on P2P. Wired seems to believe that it would be a piracy levy on ISPs, but I think it would be a real license paid on a monthly basis.

It was about time! I had previously wrote here that Sony was now the last major music company not having announced any plan to offer its music catalog in MP3 format without DRM (without digital rights protection). This is about to change.

Sony, like the other disc producers/distributors, finally figured it out: Consumers are actually ready to pay MP3 files to Apple and Amazon if the protection is not included (or very limited). Instead of staying behind (and off the sales increase for online music) disc producers come back to reason.

About Sony, I don’t know yet if the move will immediately cover the full catalog or a part only, but this is already going far enough to say that this is only a matter of time.

The door is opening wide onto the online sales of legal MP3 files but without silly protection.

Source: Business Week.

We learned this week that Warner Music and AMazon are going to gang in in order to sell DRM-free MP3 files. This is the third music major to stop and listen to its customers who did not want to suffer the indignity and incovenience of this kind of digital rights protection.

EMI and Universal had already gone this way. The only big one missing is still Sony BMG (Do you remember? They were the authors of the famous rootkit installed on some of their CD to protect them and that breaking havoc on their customers’ PC machine).

Complementary information: With this annoncement, Amazon will reach nearly 3 million DRM-free MP3 files (up to now, the record was held by iTunes with -only- 2 millions).

What could be the use of network hard disk drive of one Tera-Byte which would strictly refuse to serve files because there may be a risk of breaching licensing agreement potentially applicable to them? This is the question that potential buyers should ask before purchasing the Western Digital disc drives using WD Anywhere Access: WD My Book World Edition.

There is a long list of file suffixes that cannot be shared on a network (even a local one) on this type of hard disc drive.

In my opinion, a WD My Book World Edition disc is defintely worthless. You cannot usefully put on it an MP3 file, and AVI file, a TMP file, a QuickTime video or a Windows Media video. Western Digital seems worried that you may not have the licensing rights for these. So they don’t want you to use them. Leave those Western Digital discs at he irresponsible stores which are selling them or bring them back.

After EMI which decided to start pushing its music catalog in DRM-free MP3 format, others seem to be ready to go the way consumers wanted to. It is said that Warner and Sony are prepared to step back in front of the strong reaction coming from both the consumers and the distribution channel (most recently, Wal Mart and a group of English retailers).

Also, Deutsche Grammophon (a subsidiary of Universal Music) has decided to open its DRM-free online music store.

And in a parallel thread, Amazon and Pepsi are teaming up to give away 1 million DRM-free songs in 2008.

About a month ago, I was invited by a friend to a music workshop where he is participating in the Cultural center of the Gazometro in Porto Alegre (Brazil). I had brought my digital camera et here are some of the images produced then despite the awfully limited light.

Note: Just click on the thumbnails below if you want to see the larger photos.

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No doubt the lack of light limited the possibilities (slow speed, high sensitivy and hard lights all compete to produce movement blurs, digital noise and high contrasts) but with some attention you may bring back some images nearly acceptable even if they would not be printed in large format (or you have to love blurred and grainy photos).

My prefered ones are marked with ***

The very first discs for BluRay+ (BluRay discs with BD+ newest DRM technology) arrived: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow. Unfortunately, these discs are nearly useless because of the DRM scheme used to protect them.

For the first time, they use a virtual machine technology that allows to load code at the same time as the video data. It is thought to be a way to run code that would check if the BluRay players has been hacked. However, the discs do not play on Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100, and most other players (including the PlayStation 3) have longer-than-usual load times (up to two minutes). Samsung’s BDP-1000 also has problems of stuttering and error messages.

Some of the manufacturers announced software updates, but remember that now that DRM is on us, we may have to upgrade the player firmware just to play a DVD…

I cannot really test it from my trip in South America. However, I thought useful to inform you that there is a new web site providing free movies. You just have to accept some ads (not very different from what you have on most TV channels).

SpiralFrog

Did I speak about its legal status? It is legal. However, everything is protected by DRM, you need to use Windows and Windows Media Player 10+, and if you don’t watch the ads at least once in 30 days, the movie and the music is out…

Strange coincidence in the recent press releases about DVD discs.

For the first time, the industry group that manages the licenses for the DVD format (the DVD 6C Licensing Group or DVD 6C) decided to revoque the DVD patent agreement of Chinese manufacturer Chaoyue (Jiangsu) Digital [1]. They must have been doing really ugly things to loose even the right to try and manufacture DVD players.

Apparently without any link, we also learn that researchers from the Tsinghua University of Beijing created a new high definition DVD disc format. Quite similar to HD-DVD, its name will be CH-DVD (China DVD?) and it will contain some specifically Chinese patents and IP. But this is not the first time Chinese authorities tried to start a new format in direct competition with an international standard. The most recent being the EVD that roared to replace the DVD [2].