Jul 26
El Tunes, itms, HardyHeron, hardy heron, ElTunes, FairPlay, Ubuntu8.04, Ubuntu 8.04, RhythmBox, open-source, audio, drm, hack, software, riaa, itunes, music, OpenSource, open source, Ubuntu, linux
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio
It has been a solid tick since we’ve seen a good FairPlay hack, so it’s with great pleasure that we pass along El Tunes for Ubuntu 8.04 users everywhere. Tested to work on Hardy Heron using RhythmBox (but assumed to work on any modern Linux Distro with GStreamer and a media player that utilizes GStreamer), said plug-in enables open-source aficionados to play songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. As for limitations, the current version has no Pause / Seek support and cannot de-authorize a machine for playback, but a future version should hopefully cure those two quirks and add support for purchased video content and audio streaming to an AirTunes device. Give it a shot and let us know how it treats ya.
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Source: Darren Murph
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Jun 30
Filed under: Portable Audio
Rhapsody, the digital love-child of Real Networks and MTV, is best known for its DRM’d subscription music service. As such, the globe’s population of sheep-white-earbudded, sidewalk zombies have been completely off limits to its charms. Until today. While its DRM’d subscription deals remain in place, Rhapsody is now offering unprotected MP3 downloads via its Rhapsody MP3 store and via partners including Verizon’s VCAST over-the-air service and Yahoo. We’re talking 5 million DRM-free tracks (generally priced at $0.99 per song, $9.99 per album) from Indies and the four majors. Uniquely, all tracks can be previewed in full before downloading. Rhapsody VP, Neil Smith said, “We’re no longer competing with the iPod, we’re embracing it.” Perhaps, but Rhapsody’s planned $50 million marketing assault on iTunes with the help of MTV’s TV networks doesn’t exactly make them best of friends. We’re not DRM-free across the industry yet (in fact, far from it), but things are certainly moving in that direction.
Update: Signup now with the Rhapsody MP3 store and get a $10 credit which can be applied to your first album.
[Via Reuters]
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Source: Thomas Ricker
written by
Feb 19
Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
Open today for public beta after long last, DVD Jon’s first, um, “legit” software business venture: doubleTwist Desktop, a Windows-based app intended to help seamlessly organize, transcode, and sync your various media types to devices like the PSP, Kindle, and Symbian S60 and UIQ phones, as well as share online through Facebook. (Apparently a Mac version is due in Q2.) Nary a mention of DRM stripping or the like (just a couple references to “liberating” your iTunes media — convert it to MP3, stripping the FairPlay DRM), just a whole lot of talk about making your media easy to move between devices and share with friends.
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Source: Ryan Block
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Jan 24
online rentals, Silverlight, OnlineRentals, movie rentals, MovieRentals, rentals, netflix, drm, apple, mac, streaming, content, microsoft
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Recent announcements on iTunes rentals certainly caused a stir amongst the neglected Mac-masses, but it looks like the online rental game is about to get a little more cutthroat for fanboys and fangirls everywhere. According to a new report (and backed up by an earlier blog post), streaming content for Netflix subscribers is headed to Mac screens in 2008 — if everyone has their way. During the company’s Q4 earnings call this week, the snail-mail service hinted that this would be the year that streaming rentals would come to Mac users due to the advent of DRM options that play nice with Apple’s gear (namely, Microsoft’s Silverlight technology). Combine this with news that the company plans to offer all-you-can-eat online rentals for $8.99 a month, its intentions to bring a STB to market with LG, and a possible game console partnership — well, it all adds up to stiff competition for Apple and other challengers, despite what they say.
[Via Mac Rumors]
Read - Netflix: Mac Streaming Coming This Year
Read - Instant watching on Mac, Firefox, and more
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Source: Joshua Topolsky
written by
Jan 23
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
Wow, it looks like the cat-and-mouse game of DRM exploits is starting to inflict some collateral damage — the DTrace debugging tool built into Leopard is apparently locked out of iTunes and any other app that opts-out. Reasons aren’t clear, but it sure looks like Apple is trying to keep interested parties from seeing the inner workings of FairPlay and other DRM-enabled apps — which probably makes the RIAA happy, but makes it harder for devs to get work done. In the words of one DTrace developer, the lockout is “antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source.” That’s pretty harsh — but given Apple’s new love for selective feature enabling, we’re not expecting a resolution anytime soon.
[Via BoingBoing]
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Source: Nilay Patel
written by
Jan 09
Filed under: CES, HDTV, Home Entertainment
Despite SlySoft announcing that BD+ was compromised, and promising an update to its AnyDVD HD software, — which enables you to rip a Blu-ray discs — here we are a few months later and the latest is that SlySoft recommends that you buy HD DVD. But with Warner recently going blu, a question at the Blu-ray press conference was “did BD+ have anything to do with their decision?” And while Warner’s answer was “no”, afterwards it was brought to our attention by a Fox employee that BD+ has not been compromised. But, if that’s true, then where do these HD Fox titles distributed via illegal means come from? The situation is actually hilariously ironic, as in love with BD+ that Fox seems to be, high quality transfers of their movies still make it onto the internet because of the European releases of HD DVD — not distributed by Fox and thus not Blu-ray exclusive — are only protected with AACS. So if you think about it, without BD+, users would have to buy Fox titles to get them on their computer for other uses, but as it stands, it makes more sense for them skip laying down any cash and download the movies instead, nice job guys.
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Source: Ben Drawbaugh
written by
Dec 12
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio
Slowly, ever so slowly, a picture is beginning to form of Nokia’s all-you-can eat, free-for-1-year, keep-your-songs-for-life, Comes with Music (CWM) service. We know what it’s not — Universal’s Total Music (the similarities are just a coincidence) — and now we know more about what it is. The following details were just confirmed to us directly by Nokia:
- Audio is wrapped in an old-school, WMA DRM wrapper
- Songs can be burned to CD only after purchasing an upgrade of undisclosed cost
- Nokia has not announced any CWM devices, yet
- You can download music directly to your CWM device or computer using a unique PIN
- Songs will play only on your CWM device and the computer you registered with your CWM account
- Oh, and tracks will “typically” be delivered in 192kbps, while “older tracks may be delivered at 128kbps”
Understandably, Nokia was not willing to discuss the financial arrangement they are offering the labels. But come on Nokia, surely you can convince ‘em to drop the DRM by mid-2008, right? There are plenty of places to hide any added.
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Source: Thomas Ricker
written by
Aug 25
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
BioShock is undoubtedly a critical darling, but it’s not without its share of technical woes. 2K Games is already on the ball with the widescreen field of view “issue,” and has even slackened activation requirements, allowing for up to five SecuROM activations per copy of BioShock. Unfortunately, activation problems go deeper than that, since the Sony-owned SecuROM has deemed it necessary to pack in a rootkit with the BioShock installation, both for registered versions of the game and, inexplicably, the demo. We would’ve hoped 2K games chose its DRM provider carefully, and screened for such shenanigans, but Sony’s SecuROM really has no excuse, since we’ve certainly been down this path before.
[Via Fergie’s Tech Blog; thanks Nfinity]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Source: Paul Miller
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