I meant to discuss this on yesterday’s podcast, but forgot. There’s been a new round of news this week about AACS potentially being “fixed“, and other stories saying that it’s been “rebroken” – in fact, it is neither.

Here’s the gist. WinDVD rolled out an update which they said was required in order to play future discs. This of course implies that the device key for WinDVD has been revoked, and that future discs won’t be able to be decoded without a new key. That’s all well and good – it’s exactly what was predicted.

That’s it.

That’s all.

The AACS group did a stupid press release saying that they’d fixed the problem. Of course, all they’ve done is made it so the folks looking to crack the discs will have to dig around for another device or processing key.

The Volume ID hack that is somehow being tied up in this whole story is in fact mostly unrelated. Prior to this hack, folks were having to go through a few annoying machinations to obtain a volume ID, as it’s not directly readable from the disc through typical means. The volume ID, in combination with the device key or processing key is required to decrypt a disc.

So, when new discs appear which revoke WinDVD’s device key, the processing key will stop working as well, and having the volume ID won’t do any good. The VID hack is still important, at least until they figure out a way to force a new firmware to the Xbox HDDVD drives, but it doesn’t negate the key revocation.

Whew.

There’s a thread at DVInfo in which a fellow strapped an M2 lens adapter on a Canon HV20. Working with depth of field that shallow can be pretty challenging, but it’s neat to see that it worked. Crazy kids.

At a press conference in London today, EMI along with Steve Jobs announced the availability of DRM free tracks via iTunes. Macrumors has a good roundup of the news. The gist is that for an extra $0.30 per song, or for the same price per album, you’ll get 256kbps AAC files without any DRM restrictions. At this point it’s just EMI, and perhaps not even the full EMI catalog, but Apple is predicting 2.5 million DRM free tracks by the end of 2007, indicating that they expect other labels to join in the fun.

Is this one of those “tip of the iceberg” moments, where DRM finally crumbles, or will this just prove that people can’t be trusted with DRM-free music? Time will tell.

As expected, Adobe made their official CS3 announcements today. Check out their press page for the full rundown of press releases.

For most folks, CS3 is exciting because it means native-intel support on the Mac. The Mac also gets the first version of Premiere in a while, along with the new Soundbooth DAW program. The new “Photoshop CS3 Extended” gains some other interesting features, which FXGuide has summarized. As a taste – you can now import a movie into Photoshop and then paint on each frame, sequentially. Nice.

Product rollout starts in April, continuing through third quarter 2007.

This is one of those products that gets announced four or five times, but Telestream put out a press release on their new Pipeline product.

Here’s the gist – it’s an SDI to DV25/50/etc converter, with a twist. Instead of outputting over firewire, they output to ethernet. So, you can move your capture away from your playback. That’s pretty neat. There are all kinds of scenarios in which that’s a useful ability to have. Plus, any time you can move more data to a standardized infrastructure within a facility, that’s nice.

I know some more about this product, but I don’t think I’m allowed to say yet. Check back after NAB.

I’ve been avoiding posting the various bits of Apple TV news over the past few days, as it’s mostly just “Apple TV is shipping” and “Apple TV reviews are out.”

However, there’s some big news today. Someone has done some digging into what’s on the harddrive in the Apple TV and found that it’s an OSX derivative that will run normal intel binaries. Here’s the duggmirror copy of the original Something Awful post. I suppose it’s possible that this is a fake, but I’m not so sure.

The gist is that they pulled the drive, mounted it on a mac, installed Perian and Dropbear, put it back together, and now are able to playback previously unsupported video file formats. So, the Apple TV runs a stripped down OS X with a functional version of Quicktime. It may be worth picking one up just to play with, even though I don’t have a TV …

Apparently this was shown at DEMO, but I didn’t hear about it until the press releases started spreading today. Adobe has posted a prerelease version of Apollo, a crossplatform runtime for creating standalone apps that are built on HTML, Javascript and Flash. iTunes has shown us how successful a really well crafted netapp can be, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

Adobe has announced that they’re going to be announcing a product called Photoshop CS3 Extended. Among other things, their little blurb implies that it’s designed to work with motion graphics and 3d models. I don’t really know what that means – just a few extra features, or are they gunning for ZBrush and related products? I guess we’ll know on the 27th…

I broke my back on Saturday. I was sledding, then I was airborne, then I was in an ambulance. It was pretty exciting.

While in the ER, I went through the normal round of Xrays and CT scans. Because I needed to go do a followup on said injury, I ended up having to pick up a copy of these Xrays and CT scans to transfer to the appointment. In a very cool twist of modern medicine, instead of picking up films I picked up a CD-R containing all my data. Being an enterprising fellow, I made a copy of said CD. Follow the jump for more of me!

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Nvidia has announced a 128 core graphics card aimed at high end film and video editors. This seems to lend some credence to the rumor that Apple will be announcing a “Final Cut Extreme” hardware/software solution at NAB. With retail prices ranging from $2000 to more than $3000, you can start to see how such a solution could reach five digits.

Who knows what the impact of this will be, but it’s definitely an interesting possibility to consider.