This weekend marks the return of real sales to Amazon Unbox
Also, The Summer Movie Sale continues to run, labeled the Labor Day Movie Sale this week. There are 56 titles available to purchase (not rent) for just $5.99. OK, for some inexplicable, freaky reason Leonard Part 6 is in there for $9.94.
Let me say right upfront that I don’t support piracy. I believe that content creators do deserve to be paid for their work. So this post is not about freeing content for file trading. In fact, these methods will not remove the personally identifiable information from the files, so if you do put them on a file trading network they can be traced directly back to you. But I do believe in being able to use the content I’ve paid for freely without being trapped by DRM.
While there are DRM-free digital music purchase options, such as Amazon or Napster 2.0, even iTunes Plus when available, iTunes remains the dominant digital music outlet and most of the music, and nearly all of the video, available via iTunes is still ‘protected’ by Apple’s FairPlay DRM. iTunes is well designed, easy to use, and has a massive selection, which keeps it in the lead. And, of course, the tight integration with the iPod which utterly dominates the portable market. It has a lot going for it. But FairPlay locks the content into iTunes, the iPod/iPhone, and Apple TV - oh yeah, and a handful of Motorola phones which are the only 3rd party devices supported. If you want to load the music on most phones, stream it to your TiVo or any other network media client, access it on a Linux system, etc, you’re out of luck.
Well, unless you strip the DRM to free the content and get a generic AAC music file or or H.264 video file.
There are a few ways to strip the DRM. Perhaps the most obvious is the analog hole. Play the content and re-record it. Burn a CD and re-rip it. But these are lossy methods that take the digital file, decode it to analog, then re-sample the analog and re-encode it to digital. You will lose quality, there is no way around it. Plus it takes time and you often lose all the metadata from the track and have to manually re-enter it. This is not an optimal solution. Even with software applications such as Tunebite to automate the process it is still lossy and time consuming. And Tunebite isn’t cheap.
The developer community has developed various software applications to make stripping iTunes DRM easier. One of the best known was Hymn and then JHymn from the Hymn Project (Here Your Music aNywhere) which was able to decrypt iTunes music files directly. But Apple changed the system with iTunes 6 and JHymn stopped working. For a while you could just avoid upgrading iTunes, but eventually Apple starting forcing updates by blocking access to content from older versions.
So the community developed a new technique, intercepting the AAC data from Quicktime. During playback the files are decrypted and then passed to the decoder, and in the process the unencrypted data was exposed. This allowed QTFairUse6 and myFairTunes to free the content. This technique still required playing the music, but it was lossless. The AAC data was captured as-is, there was no digital-analog-digital loop. They could also ‘play’ the tracks at 6x speed, to process the files faster than ‘real time’. And the tools would transfer all of the metadata so the new DRM free files would have all the data the original files had. This worked well, but with iTunes 7.6 Apple patched this loophole. You can still use these if you haven’t yet updated iTunes, but it is inevitable that Apple will start pushing the need to upgrade as they always have in the past.
And so the arms race continues. And the community has delivered again, and this time with perhaps the best solution yet, Requiem. Requiem works on Windows or Mac and decrypts any purchased iTunes content - music or video. (It doesn’t work on video rentals.) It works in the current 7.7.1 iTunes release.
There is no need to ‘play’ the tracks, it quickly decrypts them in place. For every .m4p file you get a matching .m4a file, for every .m4v you get an .mp4. Quick and easy. So much so that it is the first such solution to attract the attention of Apple. They pretty much ignored the previous solutions, but when Requiem surfaced they started sending out Cease and Desist notices to sites that linked to it. So I won’t be linking to it, but it sure is easy to find if you Google on ‘Requiem 1.7.3′, the current version. It is generally available via BitTorrent despite Apple’s efforts.
The easiest way to use it is to run the Java JAR file and just point it at your iTunes directory. It’ll de-DRM any DRM’d iTunes content it finds. Then you’re left with two tasks:
1. Update iTunes to use the unprotected files
2. Move or delete the old protected files (.m4p and .m4v)
To do step one you’ll need to find your iTunes library files - mine are in C:\Documents and Settings\Mr MegaZone\My Documents\My Music\iTunes. (I’m obviously on Windows, Mac users feel free to chime in in the comments with instructions.) First make backup copies of iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml. Now replace iTunes Library.itl with an empty (0 byte) file. You can do that by deleting the existing file, then right click and say New -> Text Document, and rename the document. Then open iTunes Music Library.xml in your favorite text editor. Search and replace .m4p with .m4a and .m4v with .mp4. (If you didn’t unprotect all of the files in your library you’ll have to look for the specific entries to replace instead of doing all of them.) Now open iTunes. It will see the ‘corrupted’ iTunes Library.itl file and import the data from the XML file to repair it. There you go, iTunes will now use the de-DRM’d files.
For step two open Windows explorer and navigate to your iTunes music folder. Open Search, select All files and folders, more advanced options, then under Type of File and select MPEG-4 Audio File (Protected) and search. This will find all the .m4p files. You can then move the files to back them up, or delete them. (I suggest backing them up.) Do the same for MPEG-4 Video File, this should find the .m4v files. (The .mp4 files show as MPEG-4 Movie.)
And now your iTunes content is DRM free!
There is one other issue, while iTunes Plus music is DRM-free, the files don’t work in all AAC-capable players. This is because Apple has inserted an ‘atom’ within the file in such a way that it breaks some decoder’s parsers. The ‘pinf’ atom is set as a sibling instead of a child node. Fortunately there is another community tool, PutPinfInItsPlace, which will fix the files. All it does is correct the one byte ‘error’ Apple has deliberately placed in the file. Once fixed the files will switch from ‘Purchased AAC audio file’ to ‘AAC audio file’ in iTunes. It is Java-based and works on Windows or Mac. It isn’t as easy to use as Requiem in that you have to select the files to fix. You can select multiple files at once, but only in one directory at a time. So you can’t just point it at your iTunes library and fix it all at once. Still, it isn’t hard and you only need to do it once. Since it is simply fixing he atom tree structure in the file there isn’t any change to the content.
Between these two tools you can have an iTunes library that consists entirely of DRM-free .m4a and .mp4 files that work on any device that handles the formats. At least until the next time Apple finds a way t prevent the tools from working until the next round of stripping tools. That is nearly inevitable.
DRM is just an inconvenience for legitimate users and doesn’t really stop piracy. And I think it discourages purchases. I have over 15,000 tracks in iTunes, and they’re all legal - ripped from CDs or purchased from iTunes. Over the past three years I’ve spent over $2,700 in iTunes - but only when I’ve been able to strip the DRM losslessly. During any period when DRM stripping has lagged I won’t purchase anything from iTunes (well, except iTunes Plus now). Make the content DRM free so people can use it on any device and they’re much more likely to purchase. In the meantime you can do the above to free your iTunes content. Have fun.
TiVo issued a press release today to announce their participation in the conference next week:
TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced that it will present at the Kaufman Bros. 11th Annual Investor Conference on September 3rd. The webcast of the presentation will be available on the Investor Relations section of the TiVo website at http://investor.tivo.com under the events calendar tab.
Conference Details:
Kaufman Bros. 11th Annual Investor Conference
New York, NY
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
1:00 PM ET
Tom Rogers, CEO and President
I just updated a few of the plug-ins I use on this site, so let me know if you experience any issues.
I also finally got around to switching to Firefox 3 yesterday. I’d kept using Firefox 2 because of some of the browser add-ons I prefer not yet being supported on FF3. But they flipped the switch to start prompting FF2 users to upgrade, and I decided enough of the add-ons were now available to make the jump.
Unfortunately it looks like two of my favorite Firefox extensions are gone for good - Tabbrowser Preferences and Google Browser Sync. Tabbrowser Preferences was last updated in 2006 and it looks like development is dead and it won’t be updated for FF3. I’m trying out Tab Mix Plus as a replacement, and it seems to do a decent job, but if anyone has a suggestion for a better add-on to replace Tabbrowser Preferences I’d love to hear it.
And I was upset to find that Google has discontinued Google Browser Sync. If you currently have it installed you can continue using it through 2008, but you can no longer download the add-on and it wasn’t updated for FF3. This is the biggest loss for me, I made constant use of this. I loved being able to close FF and re-open it later with my existing session even moving from one machine to another. And keeping everything in sync - passwords, bookmarks, etc. I was thrilled back when it came out because it finally gave me something to match the old Roaming support in Netscape 4.7.
So far I haven’t found a replacement for it. I’m using Foxmarks for bookmark sync and backup, but it only does bookmarks. Tab Mix Plus has some session persistence, but only on the same machine. I checked out Mozilla Weave but it is in the very early stages, and right now they aren’t accepting any more users anyway. Google has turned over the code via Google Code so someone may resurrect it in a new form. But in the meantime I’d love to hear there is a good replacement out there.
This was an especially bad thing to find out because during the upgrade I lost my current bookmarks and they reverted to a set many months old. Back when FF3 was in beta I’d installed it alongside FF2 and it imported my bookmarks. I’d since removed the FF3 beta from my system. But apparently the imported bookmarks lingered, and when I upgraded from FF2 to FF3 yesterday instead of importing my FF2 bookmarks it just used the old FF3 set, yet it seems to have completely removed any trace of my FF2 bookmarks from my system. So I’ve lost any new bookmarks I’ve added since then, and, of course, just last week I’d finally gotten around to cleaning up my bookmarks to delete a bunch and file them, and now all the junk is back and messy. Sure there is a nice copy stored in Google Browser Sync, but now I can’t get to them. Even if I reinstalled FF2 the add-on download is gone. (If anyone knows where I can get the XPI to install it, that’d be great.)
In general FF3 is a nice upgrade, despite the troubles, though I’m really not seeing what is so awesome about the ‘awesome bar’ (as some call the URL/Location bar in FF3). Even in FF2 I disliked the way it’d suggest pages from the history and I always lock that down to just pages I’ve actually typed - as below. If there are any other add-ons or configuration tweaks you think I just have to check out, let me know. Share your Firefox tips for everyone to see.
Some of the settings I tweak in about:config in FF3 (definitely not a comprehensive list):
Read the rest of this entry »
TiVo today reported their financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2009, which ended July 31st. They had a good quarter, turning in their second profitable quarter in a row, and their third ever, with $2.9 million net income and $10.6 million adjusted EBITDA. TiVo highlighted a few items in their release:
- Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $10.6 million compared to a loss of $(11.2) million in the year-ago quarter, exceeding guidance
- Net Income for the second quarter was $2.9 million compared to a loss of $(17.7) million in the year-ago quarter
- TiVo service on Comcast now available in Connecticut; Comcast will also continue to fund development work for the TiVo product to expand the feature set and add support for the Tru2way infrastructure
- TiVo and Entertainment Weekly join forces to connect TV viewers with their favorite shows on an automatic basis
- TiVo successfully launched in Australia by Seven Networks
- YouTube videos now available on the TiVo service; TiVo now provides access to more television and broadband content choices than any other offering in the world
- TiVo’s recent research deal with media marketing research firm TRA ties anonymous viewing behavior to product purchases in millions of homes; Significantly changing the quality of information available to marketers
TiVo is continuing to bleed subscribers, which was expected. With DirecTV continuing to push their in-house HR20/21 DVRs are upgrades for DirecTiVo users, even with additions from Comcast, Cox, and Cablevision Mexico, TiVo lost 136,000 net MSO/Broadcaster subscribers. And while TiVo added 36,000 gross TiVo-owned subscribers, they lost 78,000 gross TiVo-owned subs, for a net loss of 42,000 TiVo-owned subscribers. This is mainly due to legacy subscribers upgrading to HDTV and opting for cable or satellite DVRs. This leaves TiVo with 1.686 million TiVo-owned subscriptions and 3.623 total cumulative subscriptions.
This may sound bad, but it is also partly because TiVo has made massive cuts in their marketing efforts to focus on profitability instead of subscriber growth. For the quarter just ended their subscriber acquisition cost was only $135, a massive decrease from the $758 of a year ago, and only a slight up-tick from the $118 of last quarter. Instead of lots of marketing, subsidies, and rebates, which drive up SAC, TiVo is focusing on working with retailers and other vendors to bundle TiVo with HDTV purchases to capture those upgraders before they pick up another DVR. They’re also focusing on their partnerships with Cablevision Mexico, Comcast, Cox, and Seven Network in Australia.
And in that area things are looking good. The TiVo launch in Australia with Seven Network has been going well and TiVo is happy with it, though actual figures have not been released. And Comcast is finally ready to start a major marketing push and to announce more territories:
In regards to our mass distribution strategy, a top Comcast executive offered the following comments on the progress the TiVo on Comcast service has made to date: “We are pleased with the progress of the TiVo service and have broadened its footprint in our New England market to Connecticut. Refinements to optimize the product’s performance have been mostly completed, significantly improving the user experience. Importantly, we intend to light up a full marketing campaign around TiVo in September and, upon this occurring, we will be announcing multiple additional markets to which TiVo will be rolled out through next year. We will also continue to fund development work for the TiVo product, which will include expanding the feature set and adding support for Tru2way infrastructure.”
Rogers stated, “Additionally, the TiVo service on Cox, which is currently in trials, is on track for a launch in Cox’s New England market later this year.”
“On the international front, Seven and TiVo successfully launched the TiVo service in Australia and because of the significant consumer demand there, retailers chose to release the product early. We are also extremely pleased with the marketing shoulder Seven is putting behind this launch as they’ve prominently featured TiVo in their marketing and programming including the Olympic opening ceremonies, their top rated morning show, and a special advertising spot they developed, which includes dozens of Australian celebrities. International distribution is an increasingly important component of our business model and there continues to be tremendous interest from international distributors for the TiVo offering.”
During the Q&A session when asked if Comcast had gotten to the point where they don’t require a truck roll for the TiVo software install, Rogers answered that that issue was a dependency on non-TiVo software and that Comcast was close to deploying the solution. It sounded like that was the gating factor for Comcast to launch the marketing effort, and that also helps explain Comcast’s satisfaction despite the delays, it doesn’t sound like it was TiVo’s problem.
During the Q&A session at the end of the call, Rogers once again mentioned a tru2way TiVo box, what the user community has started calling a ‘Series4′. He didn’t offer any specifics (unsurprisingly), but his feeling is that it will take more time for the industry to establish a national tru2way playing field to make it viable to release such a product. Personally I think that they may show something, prototype perhaps, at CES in January with the release for later in 2009 as most of the cable MSOs have pledged to have tru2way in place by July, 2009. Just my speculation.
You can get more information from TiVo’s release and key metrics.
I’ve said it before, and I will probably say it again, all 1080p content is not the same. There is more to picture quality than lines of resolution or pixel count, bit rate is equally important, if not more so. With DirecTV, DISH Network, VUDU, and others touting their 1080p content they’re often comparing it to the gold standard in home video - Blu-ray Disc. As DISH Network did just the other day: “Blu-Ray Disc quality 1080p resolution”. And that doesn’t get into the audio, which doesn’t come close to the lossless audio available on many Blu-ray titles. Well, it looks like the Blu-ray Disc Association has finally had enough, according to David Mercer at StrategyAnalytics:
These claims have clearly struck a sensitive nerve within the Blu-ray community, which, given their strategy as outlined above, is perhaps not surprising. Today the BDA has given me the following statement:
“A number of companies have recently launched advertising campaigns claiming their products deliver high definition picture and sound “equal” to that delivered by Blu-ray Disc. These comparisons are irresponsible and are misleading to consumers. Up conversion and satellite broadcast cannot provide a true Blu-ray high definition experience, as neither is technically capable of producing the quality delivered by Blu-ray players and Blu-ray discs. To that end, the Blu-ray Disc Association is exploring these claims further and will take appropriate action, as necessary, to prevent consumers seeking the ultimate in high-definition home entertainment from being misled.”
I’m happy to see this. Blu-ray has struggled to educate consumers about higher quality home cinema, and now that it is started to gain recognition and traction in the market other vendors are trying to ride their coattails by tricking consumers into thinking they offer the same quality experience just because they’re also ‘1080p’.
Picked up from EngadgetHD.
It isn’t quite as good as the recent $131.99 deal at Buy.com, but it is still a good one. Amazon is selling the Western Digital 500GB My DVR Expander eSATA drive, compatible with the TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD (and Scientific Atlanta cable DVRs) for just $134.99. That’s 29%, $55, off the usual Amazon list price of $189.99.