SideQuest

DMCA takedowns have no merit to the world

Wow internet people of the world. I was surprised tonight. As slow as defending DeCSS took off all those years ago, so quick was the defending of the AACS key. Many people on the Internet spoke out tonight after AACS LA started sending out takedown notices to companies that hosted a key published by some of their users. The biggest thing as far as I'm concerned is that people seem to be willing to break the companies they love (digg and Google) just to prove the stupidity of the DMCA take down notices. These users are not against Digg and Google, they are it's most active supporters, and they will use their favourite tools to prove the governments in the world that the DMCA is giving the DRM companies too much power over other companies that are simply doing their work. They proved that the "secret" is to be protected by the DRM company, and not by all the other companies in the world. The secret is out, and Google and Digg can't stop it, just as little as the DRM companies could prevent the "secret" from getting out in the first place. To ask Google and Digg to stop it is unrealistic, costly and without merit to society as a whole. There are thousands of ways we can communicate those few digits, songs, videos, DNS records, different notations, weak "encoding" variants, barcodes, images, ascii art, etc etc.
It is my full conviction that not a judge in the world will judge Google or Digg as libel in this case. There was no stopping the world, without a full take-down of the companies involved. They couldn't have hired people fast enough to remove it, as others would be able to post it online. Let's HOPE it goes to court, that will stop this idiot-icy once and for all.

]]> I'm proud to be part of the new Internet generation. Sure it has it's faults, the world always has had faults, but it's time people realize that there is no stopping to this. Information is shared now almost by definition, and the knowledge it has spread is far outweighing the "bad" knowledge it's spreading. Information is our drug, our virus. Change your business models, because I'm tired of not owning what I buy, and I'm not the only one.
These companies are forgetting that they serve society in their needs. We pay them and expect certain things back. More and more of our expectations are flatly ignored in order to "save the income" of these companies. If we don't give you money, then that means you are doing something wrong, and the company deserves to go broke. It should not get protected by governments and organizations that serve those same organizations. Many people have said: "If there was a better business-model, then that model would be more successful and win over the other companies". However this is no longer true. This industry as a whole has become so protected that any other business model is no longer viable. You want proof of that ? Well here is a model: I use work of others that I'm allowed to use for free. Let's say an Internet radio station and freely licensed music. Sounds like a viable model, albeit one where I have to do a lot of work. Any commoner would come to such a conclusion. Guess what; It's not viable. In the USA you will have to pay SoundExchange (a daughter of RIAA) regardless of what kind of music you broadcast on the Internet. If the artist doesn't join up with RIAA and collects it's fees, too bad for them, all the money goes to RIAA. (link) This is just anti-competitive and the US government should be thrown out over allowing RIAA to work in such a matter.

There is one big thing that people are often forgetting. There is a lot of talk about the movie and music industry. Their sales are indeed rapidly decreasing etc etc. But what we forget is that the Entertainment industry as a whole is still growing. Television, gaming, sports, events, internet entertainment, iPod, etc have all seen enormous growth over the past years. We are just busy with more stuff then ever before and that's the primary reason we consume less music and movies. You are not losing money over piracy, you are losing money because you are not correctly reading the market you are selling to. Hell some people are even turning to piracy now because of the trouble they have to go trough with their legally bought digital music. And knowing the average computer capabilities of the Internet user I'm not surprised, and neither should they be.

Finally more and more people start to see where all these guidelines are problematic and they start fighting it. This is not about not being willing to pay certain companies for their products. It's about the protection these companies enforce and the government's involvement with these companies. It's about owning a song once you bought it, regardless of the format. It's about being able to buy what you want, without having to wait 1,5 year before the product enters your geographic-market. It's about being able to decrypt your movies 30 years after official DVD players were taken out of production. It's about your right to publish a 16 hex number, regardless of what it means. It's about the bullying of the companies we love, by the companies we hate. And if one happens to go bankrupt in order to defend that, then we will gladly sacrifice such a company and create another one once the issue is settled.

So with saying: "09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" to everyone I end this post.

IBC 2006

Jean Paul Saman and I visited IBC 2006 again this year, and I have put a small photo tour online. VLC was seen quite a few times again on the floor, this time some of the companies included were names like Cisco, Siemens, Thomsson and Fraunhofer. Our friends from Anevia were there as well of course. It was a busy IBC this year with great weather and we had a wonderful time. I was however a bit disappointed by not seeing much revolutionary technology. It was all basically a refinement of what we saw last year, but nothing really stood out.
Let's hope next year will show as some new things.

The founding of VideoLAN

VideoLAN has been around far longer then most ppl realise. The project's sourcecode wasn't released till somewhere in 2001, but there was something working long before that. One of the 4 co-founders that started with the idea, intially known as 'network 2000', was Antoine Brenner.

Antoine was recentrly interviewed by a friend of him. The vidcast of this interview (in French) is now available on the Mobitrends weblog.

The VideoLAN servers

For those who are interested, and just so that I remember the link. Here is a gallery and a description of the VideoLAN serverpark.

VLC is just delicious

Have you seen Del.icio.us yet? It's an online community for sharing bookmarks basically. Now you know I always have to check what VLC brings up in tools like this. Well, the results are in.

Among the different interesting tidbits, I found this link to a website describing how to RIP Windows Media based Musicvideo's from Yahoo. The tutorial is pretty extensive, and applies to most other MMS streams as well. There is even a nice Flash video showing you the exact proces.

GPL violations

So after our recent issue with the Sony Rootkit, yet again several things have been reported to us. This time someone is selling our software for $29,99 without informing the user they will simply be getting VLC media player which is free for download. Read the full story on the blog of J_K9 Linux. The other report is about the possible violation of the Elanvision EV-8000S STB, which firmware includes VLC.

Google and VLC

I have always liked crawling trough Google search results for websites and images that look at, use, review, list etc. VLC in one way of another.

I have now created a small webpage that presents you with 6 random images from the Image search result of Google. It's fun to see what users do with their VLC. Give the page a whirl and see what you run into.

VLC subtitles in Japanese or Chinese

People keep running into issues with this, even though it is described in the README.MacOSX.rtf file on the diskimage. I happened to run into a small HOWTO explaining it a bit more detailed, and with pictures. I hope that by listing it here, people will be able to find the solution faster.

New Buildserver

We have asked for donations in the past in order to assist us in developing for the Mac OS X platform. Now all of a sudden we had to return our Xserve machine, which was doing the daily nightly builds and the buildbod commit checks. So we cut to the chase and bought ourselves a Powermac G5 1.8 Ghz Dual Processor machine.
It's standing at my apartment atm and I'm working on setting it up as the new buildserver. The G5 is lovely and really fast. HDTV is a breeze with this machine.
After we set it up as the new server, and as soon as I have a TOS cable etc, I will start working on improved Digital Audio support for VLC OSX, and then i made give Video Capture a try, since I know also own an iBot firewire webcam.
I'm not making any promises, but I think I should be able to get something usable soon.

VLC iPod Video Conversion

As reported on tuaw.com, Phil Windley has created a script to automatically convert Tivo (or other MPEG2 sources) into iPod G5 compatible MPEG4 video files.

DJ on Air

Hi all, it's been a long time since my last posting unfortunately. The latest news however is that I will be on the Radioshow Track21. This show is targeted at students in and around Enschede (where I live) and is broadcasted by a Local radiostation. It will be live and will begin around 19:50 CET. The subject is going to be VideoLAN and how it grew from a student pet-project into a full blown Open Source Community.
The interview is due to an article in the magazine SUM where my name was apparently mentioned in an article concerning VideoLAN.

Going to IBC and VLC on Dutch Television

I'm going to IBC tomorrow. Ticket was free, and there should be quite some interesting stuff to see there. Jean Paul and Sigmund will be attending as well, and the guys from our very own spinoff company anevia even have a stand (#1.444). Hopefully, I can spread the word on VLC a bit more (I'll be wearing my VideoLAN T-shirt).

So I was watching the news this evening, and on channel RTL4 there is this item about gadgets on IBC. And guess what? First gadget they show is a WinCE device running VLC media player for WinCE !!!! Now THAT is wicked stuff. You can see the clip here (MMS).

VideoLAN in the news

With a lot of popularity, comes more and more publicity it seems. Everything our friend Jon does get blown out of proportions of course. This is one of the reasons Jon only talks to a very limited set of journalists anymore.
Lets take the latest example of cracking the NSC encoding. Jon only talked to The Register about this. Unfortunatly they got a little bit too enthousiastic, and missed the point somewhat this time. Now it's funny how much such an article gets copied. Almost all other articles blindly copied this.

What is truly funny though is that friday late afternoon, I got a call on my cell...: "Good day, I'm looking for an interview with mr. Jon Lech Johansen". Right, how did this fellow get my number? Well, my website is named in Jon's Blog article on NSC. And my website is on my domain, which is registered on my name, and the registration has my phone number of course (Scary....). I explained that Jon is very difficult to reach, and that I would relay the message to Jon. We got talking a bit about the project, and he asked me some questions, and before I knew it I was giving an interview. The article is online now, and I specifically tried to correct some of the wild ideas that had grown in the online community about this NSC thing. It's a pretty decent article, with only a very few small errors.

Then there was carp.nl. A Dutch magazine that wanted an interview with us. They visited Antoine in Paris, and did a telephone interview with me. The article is now on page 22 of their latest issue (#13). It shows a bit about the culture of the VideoLAN project and makes for quite a nice read. Not always 100% accurate about the more technical things, but if you don't know a thing about Video or FOSS, you won't notice, care or be misinformed. Great publicity beyond our usual online attention. Let's hope it gets the word out even more.

It's nice that we are clearly making a stir beyond our own little circle. VLC is getting more popular. Lets hope we can all keep up, for we are not FireFox.

Multicast from Windows Media Server

Our good friend Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered the encoding used by NSC announcement files which contain the information to join Multicast Windows Media Streaming sessions. So i'm working on getting this into VLC right now and hopefully "Very Soon Now", VLC will support WMS multicast. Let's REJOICE.

Update:I now have a nsc file decoder for VLC. Next step is to get this information passed to a new connection so we can have decode the ASF in the UDP stream we receive.

VLC 0.8.2 passes 6 million downloads

VLC media player is getting really popular now. The latest release (0.8.2) has been downloaded over 6 million times now. That truly is a lot of downloads and I think everyone in the team is really proud of that. Lets hope that we will grow and grow and one day can get close to the quality that a project like mozilla provides.
Also let us not forget that the 6 million downloads are almost all Windows and Mac OS X downloads. The linux distributions often distribute VLC themselves. And then there is the Freeplayer spin off, and the Google Video Viewer plugin, and Annodex plugins and Tryst and all those other applications that are based on the VLC source code. Lets keep going guys !