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Sony Japan to Abolish Copy Controlled CDs
Gridle writes "In a complete reversal of their policy and on the heels of Avex's partial cessation of copy protected CDs (translation), Sony Music Entertainment in Japan has announced that it will abolish its Label Gate CCCD format (translation) beginning in November 2004 and move back to normal CD-audio format discs for all future releases. Reasons cited are music users' increased consciousness about copyrights and maintenance of legality (conformity to the CD-audio format specification). In related news, Sony also released a slightly updated HD walkman (translation) due to pressure from the iPod, but because of hardware limitations the device still does not support MP3 playback."
What happened to their promise that all new portables would do MP3, and they'd have firmware updates for existing ones?
The article only mentions ATRAC, but from the translation it's hard to tell whether ATRAC is the main format or the only format. This article on the larger model mentions mp3 support.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
The UK however I don't have a clue about. However if you can get a DVD player through customs send one home and change its power plug :)
In this article Sony says that they are working hard to bring MP3 devices to market but they have nothing to announce at this time.
http://www.busyweather.com/
1. can I get a region free DVD drive for my Dell laptops? no.
You can play DVD's from any region on any player if you use software with decss... like VLC and such. (Yes, it works under Windows too.)
Some links that may be of interest to you:l ist&to ols=region&pol=2c om/
:-)
http://dvd.box.sk/index.php?pid=d_soft&prj=
http://regionhacks.datatestlab.
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks
Enjoy your movies
Mplayer uses it too, there is also a Windows version
BTW, it is not libcss anymore, but libdvdcss.
Move Sig. For great justice.
>Sony's "NW-HD2" music player only accepts
>their proprietary ATRAC* audio format. What
>about all my mp3's?
Huh? It transparently converts mp3 to ATRAC3+ in import process, so average consumer only notices that it takes a bit long time to import mp3 tracks in their walkman. In other words, it can 'play' mp3, but not natively, from the beginning of the release of the product.
I think it's because it shows one (or both) of two things.
Coming from a company so involved in the industry I see this as a good thing. If nothing else it's a pleasant change to the usual story of trying to prolong the failing practice at the expense of customer irritation.
Even if it is "a simple decision to end a failing practice" it would be a very welcome decision if more companies would realise that irritating your customers isn't going to increase sales.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
Possibly. Try having a look on The Firmware Page and seeing if there is a region-unlocked firmware for the drive in your Dell laptop. Your other alternative is to get hold of a program like DVD Region Free which I believe will strip off the region coding (and other things) before it reaches your DVD player software.
No, you can't. For about the last five years, DVD drives themselves have been enforcing region coding in firmware. Firmwares that do not enforce regioning are called RPC-1. Ones that do are called RPC-2. The only way to make a recent drive RPC-1 is with a hacked firmware, since the companies only release RPC-2.
The Firmware Page is one of the best sources for hacked RPC-1 firmware. But if no one has hacked up a new firmware for your drive, then there's no way around region coding regardless what software you're using.
Ok, this is going completely offtopic, but
The PS2 is simply two PS1 cpu's in one box.
Err, that's just a lie. PS specs vs PS2 specs.
They didn't improve the controller design
In fact, the directional pad and button pads are analogue on the PS2 controller, they were pure digital "On/Off" on the PS1. Also, since the shape of the controller is pretty much perfect as far as most people are concerned, it would have been a little silly to replace it.
nor did they include a hdd or network connection
Makes it a damn sight cheaper than an XBox, particularly when they first came out, wonder if that was the idea?
And for kickers, they placed they power switch on the back of the system
This is golden! The power switch is on the front of the system. It's the one with the universal power switch symbol used on every TV, hifi, video recorder since I was born. Hold it down for a second, et voila!
On topic though, I agree that the whole ATRAC thing is a load of bollocks. The real reason I stopped buying Sony (with the exception of my PS2) is that after my minidisc walkman's power adapter broke and it cost £15 for a new one - even though its exactly the same as a £5 adapter you could buy from any electronics shop, just with a funky plug.
Woah, buddy. This statement is wrong. There is a kernel of truth to it, but by and large you're wrong.
Have you ever tried using libdvdcss on Linux? It's clear you haven't, because even a cursory trial would show you that libdvdcss can play back about 98% of DVD discs on any RPC-2 drive without regard to region coding.
The problem here is that you're confusing two different issues: region coding and CSS encryption. The one does not really have anything to do with the other, even though they are interlinked in actual implementation.
So here's the real story. Region coding and CSS are two independent attributes of a DVD disc. That is, a disc can have region coding alone, CSS encryption alone, both, or neither. Both RPC-1 and RPC-2 drives have firmware to extract CSS decryption keys. The only difference between an RPC-1 drive and an RPC-2 drive is that an RPC-2 drive has firmware which detects region mismatches and in the event of a region mismatch the drive will not provide the CSS decryption keys.
The last sentence sounds like an insurmountable obstacle to DVD playback, but it's not, because CSS has been cracked. The best known attack on CSS today uses a known plaintext vulnerability in the algorithm to recover the key. In order for this attack to work, the plaintext (i.e. unencrypted form) of at least part of the movie must be known. Luckily in most cases the movie begins with a black screen for at least a few frames, so this serves as a plaintext crib that allows libdvdcss to break the CSS encryption easily. Result: libdvdcss can play back most DVDs regardless of the disc region or the RPC status of the drive.
On very rare occasions (the 2% mentioned above), the libdvdcss library fails to carry out the known plaintext attack, in which case it has to fall back to much slower search techniques which can take anywhere from 40 minutes to several days to crack the key.
Here's a tip for anyone using libdvdcss: the CSS keys are cached in the ~/.dvdcss directory, so you only have to crack a DVD disc once in order for libdvdcss to have free access to the disc. If there's a disc that libdvdcss can't crack, just take it to any DVD drive in the world that matches the disc region (whether RPC-1 or otherwise) and run any libdvdcss program. The program will cache the keys in that directory and you can then copy the keys to any computer you want in order to gain unrestricted disc access on that computer.