Ok, I’m a bit sleep deprived, but man-oh-man was that amazing. Steve was giddy! Everyone in the audience was giddy!
Go look at the iPhone. Watch the Keynote. I’m one of the ones cheering every time Steve said anything.
Wow.
iPhone!
Reply
Inside!
More Lines…
In Line for MacWorld
We got in line about 4:30, and we’re about 300 people back. Woah. This place is crazy to the max
This line wraps around one side of Moscone – this photo is of the first half of the second side.
Only 3 and a half hours to go!
I have been to Mecca
We drove down to Cupertino today to do some testing of Scopebox at Apple’s developer labs. I’m not sure how much I can say without breaking NDA, but just imagine a room full of one of every machine that Apple has sold in the last decade. They open the door, and say “let us know if you need anything” and that’s it. Rad.
Other than that, San Francisco is an amazing place. I love it here. Keynote tomorrow – line up at 4am. I’ll be wearing a Scopebox shirt if you’re there.
Viva MacWorld!
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD Combo Player?
Engadget claims that LG is going to debut a dual format Blu-Ray / HD-DVD player at CES. This would be a huge step towards resolving this stupid format war, so let’s hope that they do. Engadget is a bit skeptical in regards to LG’s ability to follow through.
Premiere comes back to the Mac
It’s been rumored for a while, but Adobe is about to officially announce the return of Premiere on the Mac platform. Macworld has the scoop. Looks like I’ll get to play with it at Macworld next week (assuming my head hasn’t exploded from the joy of the keynote).
This is exciting, not because I’m a huge fan of Premiere, but because it again shows Adobe’s faith in the Mac platform, and it provides that much more incentive to bring users over from Windows. That said, Premiere Pro 2.0 is a pretty decent program. It’s not quite Final Cut, but it does have the benefit of tight integration with After Effects and the other Adobe applications.
From the look of the single screenshot, it looks like they’re not tying it too heavily to the OS, which makes some sense. If you notice, they’ve got all their palettes situated within a single OS X window, rather than being truly free-floating. I would assume that limited integration holds true on the backend, so it will be interesting to see how codec issues are dealt with. It’ll be interesting to see it next week.
Cool stuff.
[Update:] The press release is now available, and in the release Adobe makes it clear that they intend to ship Encore for the Mac as well. That’s seriously good news, as Encore nicely fills a space between DVD Studio Pro and iDVD.
Scopebox is For Realz Yo
I hope you’ve all been saving your pennies, because after 9 months of work, Scopebox is being released tomorrow, January 3rd. You’ll be able to download a trial, find out how rad it is, and then purchase your copy.
If you’re not convinced, check out this glowing review at Behind the Frame. Hoorah!
AACS cracking – here’s the deal
Earlier this week, news broke that someone had “cracked” the AACS DRM system used by both HD-DVD and BluRay. At this point, there hasn’t been independent verification of any of this, but here’s the deal as best as I understand.
A guy named muslix64 on the Doom9 forums figured out a way to extract title keys from HD-DVD discs, very likely using a vulnerability in Power DVD 6.5. He then wrote a decryption tool based on the publicly available AACS specifications. He released the software, including source, but did not release any title keys. He made hints that there is a fundamental flaw in the way title keys are handled, and that player revocation is unimportant. With player revocation, a flawed player (such as Power DVD, if indeed it is vulnerable) can be disabled from playing future discs.
It’s interesting, if indeed it’s true. There is no evidence that the AACS encryption itself is flawed, and indeed, that seems unlikely as it’s essentially an implementation of AES. However, we know that using encryption for DRM on untrusted hardware is likely to have some vulnerability, if you’re willing to dig deep enough. That is apparently what’s happened here.
What does it mean? Not much right now. Muslix64 has disappeared, and nobody has been able to discover the relevant title keys at this point. If someone does recreate a title key extraction method, it would be an interesting alternative to the world of DVD cracking. Instead of having a DMCA-violating circumvention device in the form of DeCSS or any of the later decryption programs, you could instead have a totally legitimate decoder tool paired with some title keys. The legality of the title keys would be questionable – the court case would be very interesting. In any case, it’s likely that you’d get your HD-DVD, check online to get the title key, paste it into your ripper and be done.
Give it 6 weeks and check again. This could be a blip, this could be the death of BluRay and HD-DVD. We’ll see.
Sony HVR-1500 deck breaks my heart to little pieces
So first off, I find it shocking that the first mention I get of a new HDV deck is via a DVD mailed to me by Sony. I’m speaking of the HVR-1500, a new half-rack studio HDV deck. No links here, because Sony has no mention of it on their website. It sounds like it was announced in conjunction with the HVR-V1U camera.
So why does it break my heart? Because it’s SO close to being what I really want. It’s got expandable input and output options. One of those options is HD-SDI output. But input? Oh, I’m sorry, I’m afraid it’s limited to SD-SDI. What?!
This is such blatant marketing-driven stupidity on the part of Sony. We can’t have folks using HDV as a record format in a professional setting, that’d be crazy! So we best cripple the product.
I’m encoding the video they sent me to post here, so you can marvel at the greatness that Sony almost achieved. I’m going to be doing some shin-kicking at NAB this year …
[Edit: Video Posted Below]