Links for 2008-10-02

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Links for 2008-09-26

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Links for 2008-08-18

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Downloadable movies and the DVP5960

So Mulley mentions that Moviestar.ie are planning to offer downloadable movies. Great concept, but I can guarantee the execution will be crap on a stick. :(

First off, the content available:

‘When the service goes live on 1 May, customers will be able to avail of content from several Irish producers including Network Ireland Television, as well as Video International’s film library which includes films like The Little Shop of Horrors. The company is also seeking content from both the History and Biography Channels, which would mean a substantial back catalogue of documentary shows.’

Sorry, but: snore.

Secondly, the technology used:

‘Moviestar.ie content must be downloaded onto a PC or laptop but can then be transferred over to digital media players like the iPod Touch for viewing on the go. This service will be compatible with Apple Macs but only if the user downloads Windows Media Player.’

So in other words, it’s Windows Media. That means it won’t play on my TV through my MythTV box, on a USB stick plugged into a Philips DVD player, on my Linux laptop, or even on a normal DVD player using a burned DVD.

Too little, too late. Plenty of Irish consumers are already consuming downloaded video — as the popularity of the Philips DVP5960 demonstrates. For legal video downloads to work, they need to be somewhere remotely near as convenient and usable as BitTorrent.

Using DRM is just falling down the same rabbit hole that swallowed up downloadable music for 5 years. Nobody used that either, until gradually the companies involved realised that opening up was the only way to get customers, bringing us to where we are today — legal downloads using the MP3 format.

BTW, I know that’s the same DRM technology used by Channel 4’s “4oD” download service. Big deal — I don’t bother trying to watch that stuff either, for the same reasons. If Channel 4 jumped off a cliff, would Moviestar.ie jump after them?

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(By the way, that Philips DVD player is a total success story. That’s a name-brand hardware manufacturer, making a low-end, $60 DVD player, with support for viewing downloaded XviD AVI movies on a USB stick. Apparently it’ll also play off USB hard disks, too. It’s immensely popular; for example, here’s a customer review of 10/10: “Best thing ever”. Several of my friends have them, and praise them highly. I’m coming up to DVD player replacement time, and I’m planning to get one too.)

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Script: mythsshimport

Here’s a useful script for users of a MythTV box equipped with a PVR-350 MPEG capture/playback cardmythsshimport:

NAME

mythsshimport – transcode and install video files onto a MythTV box

SYNOPSIS

mythsshimport file1 [file2 ...]

DESCRIPTION

Transcodes video files (AVI, MPEG, MOV, WMV etc.) into MythTV-compatible and PVR-350-optimised MPEG-2 .nuv files, suitable for viewing on a 4/3 screen, then transfers them to the MythTV backend, inserts them into the “recorded programs” listings, and builds seek tables.

All this happens on-the-fly, at faster-than-real-time rates; with a recent CPU in the transcoding box, and over an 802.11b wifi home network, you can start the process and start watching the video within 20 seconds, while it is transcoded and transferred in the background.

SSH is used as the network transport. If you have the CPU power available on the MythTV backend itself, you can run this script there (as the mythtv user) and it will skip the SSH parts entirely.

REQUIREMENTS

  • ssh password-less key access from transcode box into mythtv@mythbox (this could be localhost, if you’re transcoding on the mythbox). Test using: “ssh mythtv@mythbox echo hi”. If you run this script on the mythbox as the mythtv user, this is not required.

  • mencoder. Tested with 2:0.99+1.0pre7try2+cvs20060117-0ubuntu8 (I swear that’s a version string and not just me rolling my head around the keyboard)

  • MythTV. Tested with MythTV 0.20.

  • The “contrib/myth.rebuilddatabase.pl” script from the MythTV source tarball, installed on the mythbox in $PATH: download from svn.mythtv.org.

  • screen(1) installed on the transcoding box, used to keep the mencoder output readable

Download here.

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Underwhelmed by ScreenClick

For the past few years, I’ve been a very happy user of Netflix, the innovative web site which let you receive DVDs via the post for a flat fee per month, for US residents. When I got back to Dublin, I was very happy to see that there was a local equivalent, in the form of ScreenClick — so I signed up.

However, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with their service, for the same reasons as Adrian Weckler writes about here

Turnaround time: this varies wildly, and can take nearly a week to turn around a DVD from dropping it in the postbox to receiving the next one. Netflix was reliably two days for me, out in suburban Orange County, California; Even this Kansas blogger noted that the longest they’d waited was 4 days.

This may seem to be an externality for Screenclick — but really, it shouldn’t be. Their business is built on the postal service, and they have to have decent results for it to work.

The ‘wishlist’ model: Netflix uses a queue, operating on a first-in, first-out model, while Screenclick uses something they call a ‘wishlist’, where the DVDs are delivered based both on position in the list and availability – in other words, you can find you’ve been delivered the DVD at number 10 in your list, instead of whatever’s at the top.

Again, superficially a minor point. However, one important factor is that these services are bought by households, not by individuals. Chez jm, that means that we operated a pretty strict alternating system in our Netflix queue – one movie for me, one movie for the lovely C, repeat. This is now thoroughly scuppered with a random ‘lucky dip’ system. On top of that, forget about watching a serial in order. The end result is a mess.

The website: it’s atrocious, a hodge-podge of ads for third-party sites, press coverage of Screenclick, more ads for Screenclick (hey, I’m already a customer!), and news clippings I couldn’t care less about — with finally a few tiny sidebar boxes containing the things I want (login, search box and wishlist). My impression: it’s designed to sell the company to investors and advertisers, not for customer use.

On top of that, it’s all squished into a tiny window — Irish web designers need to buy bigger screens! That late-’90’s Jakob Nielsen thing about users not knowing how to scroll? They’ve learned by now.

That’s not even talking about the awful Javascript that’s used to edit the wishlist ordering, where little buttons need to be clicked repetitively, one by one, to reorder the list. Surely someone took a look around at other sites first — Amazon perhaps — to see how other sites do it?

Anyway, on this count, I sent in a mail containing a batch of bug reports and unsolicited opinions, and got no reply. ;)

Less bang-for-buck: pretty simple. Netflix: 3 movies at a time, more movies in the collection, $17.99 per month; Screenclick, 2 movies at a time, EUR 19.99 ($25.56, $10 more expensive than the equivalent Netflix service) per month. Surprisingly, this is actually a minor issue compared to the others, though, since it’s made plain from the outset.

These may seem to be minor points, but when selling a disposable-income service to consumers, the difference between an essential leisure-time service and a waste of pocket money is a very fine line. Looks like Adrian eventually cancelled. I’m not at that point yet, but it’s heading that way…

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Google DRM and WON Authentication

So, Google have invented their own DRM, apparently. I’m keen to find out more details; Techdirt and Plasticbag.org are so far the only places I can find in the blogosphere to discuss it in any detail.

One tidbit worth noting from the LA Times coverage:

The Google copy-protection software also imposes a big restriction: The CBS shows, NBA games and other material protected by the software can be watched only on a computer that’s connected to the Internet.

“I think it’s going to be a problem,” said Li, the Forrester analyst, adding that Google executives told her they were trying to fix it.

That’s interesting. In my opinion, given that quote, I’ll bet Google’s DRM is something similar to the copy-protection systems used for many games since about id’s Quake 3 and Valve’s Half-Life; an online “key server” which validates codes, tracks player IDs, and who’s viewing what, “live”, as the video is cued up and played.

Some more info on the Half-Life WON authentication system can be found in this GamaSutra article; subscription required — try viewing this google-cache version with Javascript off if you don’t have a sub. That’s historical now, of course, since that WON system has been replaced by a new auth protocol as part of Valve’s ‘Steam’ system.

The key factor is the network, separating the dangerous, untrustworthy user machine from the trusted key server. Since the online key server can act as a platform for trusted, known-insubvertable code to run, along with the video server, both being under Google’s control, it’s actually possible to build reasonably solid DRM on this model. That’s as opposed to the usual case, where a reasonably determined teenager can break it in a week of school-nights. ;)

Anyway, that’s speculation. It remains to be seen if they’ve come up with something along the lines of WON authentication — and if it’s still easily subvertable or not.

Update: Aristotle Pagaltzis has a pretty good point in the comments:

Watching video, unlike playing a multiplayer game, is not an activity that inherently requires connecting to a server. Playing a multiplayer game, OTOH, inherently is.

So cracking a multiplayer game’s key check is fruitless, because then you can’t play online anymore, which was the whole point of the game in the first place. In contrast, a video player with a cracked key check still fulfills its purpose just fine.

I think he’s right. That’s a key point, demonstrating how WON authentication still can’t help — media playback, as a task, is itself fundamentally crackable.

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Firebird Extension Idea

Web: I watched a hilarious Rob Corddry segment from The Daily Show last night, repeated from earlier in the week. Having not seen The Daily Show in a while, since dropping everything but basic cable, I went looking through The Daily Show video archives to see if I could find a few more good ones — with no luck.

Every link on the Video page links to something like this:

javascript:openMediaPop(’/multimedia/tds/cord/cord_8065.html’,”,’SRM’,'high’);

Which opens a popup with this page. Now, the interesting thing is that I do have Real Player installed — but for some reason, Firebird hasn’t figured this out. If I could just get through the twisty-turny maze of Javascript ‘detection’ code, I could get the URL for the .ram file directly from the server and play it.

So this is where my idea for a new extension comes in. It should do this:

  • intercept Javascript calls to navigator.userAgent, navigator.plugins et al, and allow the user to select what plugins to report;
  • add a context (right-click) menu item to list the URIs used in data attributes of object tags, and allow those to be cut and pasted — or launched in any helper apps registered for that filename extension. Alternatively, it could just replace the object with a link to open that file in the helper app.

The first allows the user to choose what plugins to report are installed, and navigate their way past broken ‘detection’ scripts like Comedy Central’s and The BBC Radio Player’s.

The second then allows the user to get hold of the URL for future use, or pop it up in an external viewer.

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Dodgy computer games studies

Science: A lab rat writes up a report on his participation in two psychology studies on ‘Video Game Violence’ and ‘Violence In the Media.’

Sadly, it seems clear that the video-game violence study will return biased results due to flawed test conditions.

Of the three games played, the most violent — a first-person shooter – was modified, either through incompetence or deliberate tweaking, to use frustrating control settings and a high level of difficulty; whereas the least violent — a sim game — was set up with all the defaults and automatic help enabled.

In my experience, frustration, in any task, has a direct correlation with anger levels. So a frustrating game, violent or not, will probably give more aggressive responses in a violence measurement — hence the FPS game above will almost definitely be cited as ‘inciting violent emotions’.

Bad scientists! No doctorate!

PS: hmm, I wonder if the paper will document the exact configuration
of the games?

Linux: Happy birthday, KDE! I love it. Most recent discovery: the excellent support for printing in KDE 3.1 using the kprinter GUI.

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NetFlix patents the DVD library

So NetFlix have patented their business method; that is, subscribing to video/DVD rentals — where instead of being charged per disc, you are charged a monthly fee and can keep the rentals indefinitely without late fees. Patent here. Now, NetFlix is a very cool service, I’ve really been enjoying it. But this patent is a bit nasty.

Think about it: what’s difficult about the NetFlix setup? Is it thinking up the concept for how the business works, as described in the patent?

Or is it executing the details, setting up efficient shipping infrastructure, tracking, billing, stock management etc., efficiently enough to make a profit?

Bad news for these companies, who are now infringing:

  • GameFly, which is the NetFlix model applied to games.
  • GreenCine, a more indie- and anime-oriented DVD site.

As one commenter on the /. story noted, ‘imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru’.

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‘The Goblin’

Observer: Russia’s cult video pirate rescripts Lord of the Rings as gangster film. This sounds hilarious — although I bet New World (iirc?) aren’t so happy about it…

They call him the Goblin. He is the new toast of Russia’s massive pirate video industry, his films sought all over Moscow. The trick of his silver screen success is that the Goblin redubs Hollywood movies, using his own ‘better’ Russian alternative to the script.

A former senior police investigator from St Petersburg, Dmitri Puchkov began by making fresh translations to replace the appalling subtitles on pirated films. But now his cult following has found pan-Russian appeal, with a ground-breaking rewrite of the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings.

In a move that has taken the Russian pirate disk world by storm and infuriated traditionalists and copyright lawyers, Puchkov has completely changed the script, turning the ‘good’ characters, like Frodo, into bumbling Russian cops, and the ‘bad’ Orcs into Russian gangsters.

The new, irreverent version of The Lord of the Rings is set in Russia. Frodo Baggins is renamed Frodo Sumkin (a derivative from the Russian word sumka, or bag). The Ranger, Aragorn, is called Agronom (Russian for farm worker). Legolas is renamed Logovaz, after a Russian car company famed for its Ladas. Boromir becomes Baralgin, after a Russian type of paracetemol.

Gandalf spends much of the film trying to impress others with his in-depth knowledge of Karl Marx, and Frodo is cursed with the filthy tongue of a Russian criminal.

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UFO Roundup on Saddam’s Alien Technology

Saddam Hussein, or Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger? You decide:

… (UFO Roundup Middle East correspondent) Mohammed Daud al-Hayyat has a theory that the golden necklaces worn by Saddam and his son Qusay are protective devices given to them by the reputed Zarzi aliens. …

‘People say that when they wear these necklaces, Saddam and Qusay have only to clasp hands, and the circle of light will appear,’ Mohammed explained, ‘The alien vortex will instantly transport them to safety. In this manner, they can create the circle without the Zarzi aliens being present.’ …

‘The latest rumor is that Saddam will shortly address the people of Iraq from an alien base on the moon! They say this will happen in four or five days.’

Classic! Snipped from UFO Roundup, via the Forteana list; full extract here. (Link)

Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 11:39:10 -0000
From: “uncle_slacky” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: FWD (UASR) 1958: A case of time travel in Montana

— In (spam-protected) “Terry W. Colvin” (spam-protected) wrote:

UFO ROUNDUP Volume 8, Number 18 May 7, 2003

You missed the best segment – the one about Saddam and the UFO:

The Saddam video “is the talk of everyone in Baghdad,” reported Ayesha al-Khatabi, a UFO Roundup Middle East correspondent. “But what is most puzzling is the mysterious golden necklace Saddam was wearing when the Azamiyah video was made. Qusay was wearing one, as well. Since Saddam is not known for wearing jewelry with his uniforms, my sources in Iraq cannot understand why he chose to wear it that day.”

Fellow correspondent Mohammed Daud al-Hayyat has a theory that the golden necklaces worn by Saddam and his son Qusay are protective devices given to them by the reputed Zarzi aliens.

(Editor’s Note: According to an urban legend, a UFO crashed in Iraq either during 1991 or 1998. Saddam granted the surviving aliens sanctuary, allowing them to live in either an underground base at Zarzi or at the centuries-old citadel at Qalaat-e-Julundi in the As- Zab as-Saghir (Little Zab) river valley in northern Iraq.)

“People say that when they wear these necklaces, Saddam and Qusay have only to clasp hands, and the circle of light will appear,” Mohammed explained, “The alien vortex will instantly transport them to safety. In this manner, they can create the circle without the Zarzi aliens being present.”

Two days after Saddam’s appearance, “on April 11 (2003),” al- Azamiyah “was the site of a firefight between Iraqis holed up in a mosque and U.S. Marines hunting for leaders of Saddam’s regime.”

Ayesha noted that “al-Azamiyah is primarily a neighborhood of Sunni Muslims, so Saddam Hussein knew he would be among friends when he appeared there.”

Also on Wednesday, April 9, 2003, according to ufologist Jose Escamilla, a cylindrical UFO was seen dodging American anti-aircraft bursts while flying over Baghdad.

“I found a rod (cylindrical UFO) that zipped through anti-aircraft explosions over the city,” Escamilla reported, “And this rod flew effortlessly and was not hit nor affected by the explosions in the air. Clear shot and it was moving very fast.”

Ayesha speculated that this “may have been the UFO that brought Saddam Hussein to al-Azamiyah earlier. The Escamilla video may actually show Saddam and Qusay leaving the city after their surprise appearance.”

On Wednesday, April 30, 2003, the ousted dictator created another stir when “a London-based Arabic newspaper published a handwritten letter purportedly signed by Saddam Hussein that called on Iraqis to rise up against American forces.”

Saddam “urged Iraqis to rebel against the ‘infidel, criminal, murderous and cowardly occupier,’ promised that people who collaborated with American-led forces would be punished and predicted that ‘the day of liberation and victory will come.”‘

“Faxed to the offices of Al-Quds al-Arabi, the letter was dated April 28, the date of Saddam’s 66th birthday.”

“The newspaper’s editor, Abdel Bari Atwan…said he had seen Saddam’s signature before and believed the one on the letter was ‘definitely’ his.”

However, “U.S. officials were skeptical about the authenticity” of Saddam’s letter and “are unsure whether Saddam survived two bombings that targeted buildings where he was believed to be, one at the outset of the war and one at the closing days.”

President George W. Bush, “speaking Sunday (April 20, 2003) at Fort Hood in Texas, said that if Saddam was alive, ‘I would suggest he not pop his head up.”‘

“In the last week, Iraqis say they have seen Saddam emerging from an underground tunnel in his hometown of Tikrit, riding in a taxi in the southern city of Basra and living in a former Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad.”

“‘There have been more sightings of Saddam Hussein than of Elvis,’ Rick Wiles, editor of American Freedom News, said.”

“Opinion is equally divided. Some people say Saddam is at Zarzi with the aliens,” Mohammed Daud al-Hayyat added, “Others say he is at the underground base at al- Ouja, two kilometers (1.2 miles) north of Tikrit. The latest rumor is that Saddam will shortly address the people of Iraq from an alien base on the moon! They say this will happen in four or five days.”

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Real-time 2D to 3D video conversion unveiled

New Scientist: Real-time 2D to 3D video conversion unveiled. “The company behind the new technology claims it is the first system to allow live television events to be watched through a PC in 3D”.

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(Untitled)

Farting Shatner’s PR genius:

A rumour of William Shatner farting during an interview pushed sales of a Star Trek video beyond the final frontier. Mark Borkowski applauds stroke of PR genius …

The source of the story was the video company’s publicist, who applied a nifty bit of creativity to one of the most intractable problems in entertainment PR. … Getting coverage for a video release is well nigh impossible because the stars have already done the circuit and everything’s already been said.

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