DVD Jon aims to smash digital Tower of Babel
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doubleTwist rolls out media sharing utility doubleTwist, the firm founded by scourge of DRM manufacturers Jon Lech Johansen (AKA DVD Jon) last March, has released software designed to allow users to share digital media files - including copy protected content - across devices.â¦
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A start-up co-founded by famed  Norwegian hacker "DVD Jon" is on Tuesday introducing a service  that enables users to copy and use copy-protected Apple Inc  iTunes songs on many popular non-Apple devices.
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New service, co-founded by hacker DVD Jon, lets users share copy-protected files from iTunes.
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Toshiba claimed yesterday to have developed the first DVD that is capable of playing both conventional and high-definition content, in the latest move in the race for the next generation of optical discs.
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Don Reisinger thinks he knows how to get us out from the high-def format war.  Will his three-step process work?
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The Audiophiliac ponders the imminent demise of HD DVD, and looks back over a long history of defunct formats.
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I saw an ad in yesterday's NY Times that offered the complete New Yorker magazine archive, including all the cartoons and ads, going back to 1920-something for a bit more than the hard disk would cost. The ad was from J&R, the company that makes the product is Pexagon. $149. Sounds like there might be DRM. I asked for something like this from the music business. A hundred gigs of popular music for $500, all pre-installed on the disk without DRM.  Someone at the New Yorker had this idea too? It's a good one. Bulk content for collector types. Another source of revenue. I want to run my own personal radio station, so having every song of a certain genre or from a certain period makes the diff.
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HD DVD has recently faced some head wind in its struggle to become the high-definition successor to the DVD, but its supporters are playing an ace from their sleeve with the arrival of the first discs that take advantage of its players' built-in Internet connections.
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Diamond jubilee This month marks the 30th anniversary of the agreement that means legitimately purchased DVD/video owners everywhere have to sit through a minute of footage warning them about piracy.â¦
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Physical media out-evolved, apparently Blu-ray Disc beat HD DVD, but who cares? Downloads, not physical media, are the future of HD content consumption. So said Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week, a comment that's a distant echo of allegations made by Transformers director Michael Bay last year.â¦
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Plus: Mashups for the masses and HD video in a digital camera.
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A cable giant looks to the future of digital video.
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By J.D. Biersdorfer  [Q.] Instead of using a movie screen with my high-definition video projector, I want to put an even bigger image right on the wall.
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Will the competing next-generation optical disc standards ever meet in the same device? Not for now, it seems.
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Sit back on the sofa and get ready for packetized, on-demand, digital broadcasts. By Frank Rose from Wired magazine.
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After cracking the encryption system that protected DVDs in order to play the discs he had bought on a PC running Linux, Jon Lech Johansen has his sights set on liberating other audiovisual content from the format in which it is sold.DoubleTwist, a company he co-founded in March 2007 with Monique Farantzos, on Tuesday released beta versions of a Facebook application and a PC desktop application for unlocking and managing music and video files.Johansen achieved notoriety as &#39;DVD Jon&#39; when he ended up in court for co-writing the DeCSS software that cracked the encryption on DVDs and allowed them to play on PCs running open-source media player software on Linux. Until then, they could only be watched using authorized hardware or proprietary software because their content was encrypted using the Content Scrambling System (CSS).He followed that up by breaking a series of other DRM (digital rights management) encryption systems including FairPlay, Apple&#39;s proprietary DRM wrapper around the open AAC format music files it sells via its iTunes Store.While Apple&#39;s iPod is not the only portable device that can play AAC files -- many Nokia phones do too -- it is the only one that can play the encrypted AAC files Apple sells. There are ways to work around Apple&#39;s DRM, including burning the files to a CD and then ripping them back into the computer in another format, but they are time-consuming.DoubleTwist&#39;s tools, Twist me and doubleTwist desktop, are intended to make it easier to move music and video files, including those locked by Apple&#39;s DRM, from one device to another, or to share them with family and friends, the company said.Twist me, the Facebook application, lets users of the social network site put music and video on their profile pages to share with friends.DoubleTwist desktop runs on Windows PCs alongside Apple&#39;s iTunes, and can take legally purchased iTunes files in the DRM-protected AAC format and, on the machine authorized to play them, turn them into MP3 files that will then play almost anywhere, the company said.The desktop software also includes tools for sharing audio and video playlists and photo albums, and synchronizing them with Nokia&#39;s NSeries, Sony Ericsson&#39;s Walkman and Cybershot phones, the Sony PSP game console and the Amazon Kindle e-reader, among other devices. In addition to AAC and MP3, it handles WMA (Windows Media Audio) and WAV audio formats, and video in MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV (Windows Media Video), AVI and the 3GP format used by mobile phones.DoubleTwist&#39;s software may soon be obsolete, though. Digital music retailers are beginning to realize that DRM just irritates customers, and Apple now offers almost half the encrypted music in its iTunes Store in higher-quality versions without DRM, at the same price. Amazon.com, meanwhile, sells all its digital music in MP3 format without DRM, as do independent online music stores such as EMusic.
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Some video buffs may want to relay their high-definition programming all over the house or take it with them on the road.