image from www.bestbuy.com

via CNN Tech

HD-DVD has recently met its end, and many customers who jumped the gun and went with HD-DVD in recent months feel jipped.  Best Buy, one of the nation’s largest electronics retailers, will be giving away $50 US gift-cardsto any customers that have recently purchased an HD-DVD player from them.  CNN estimates this will cost the company upwards of $10 Million US.  So what’s the catch? 

Best Buy also has an HD-DVD player trade-in programthat allows customers to turn in “gently used” HD-DVD players in exchange for gift-cards.

Why on earth is Best Buy just giving away gift-cards like this? Well, with HD-DVD’s recent demise, release of new Blu-Ray features, and the BDA refusing to license Blu-Ray to Chinese manufacturers, prices of current and future Blu-Ray players are on the rise. 

So Best Buy feels that consumers will turn around and use the gift-cards on the more expensive Blu-Ray players.  With the great disparity in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray player price, Best Buy is expecting to make up on the $10 Million US hit in no time.

I guess it’s more like you will be paying for HD-DVD’s mistakes.  Thanks Toshiba.

GraphEdit is a free program that is part of Microsoft’s DirectShow Software Development Kit(tools for software developers). GraphEdit allows developers to manipulate media files via plug-ins and filters outside of the developed program itself, thus allowing developers from an array of programming languages and backgrounds to easily manipulate media files within Windows.

GraphEdit, however, is not just useful for developers – it is an essential tool for the digital media enthusiast as well. GraphEdit not only allows users to test and tune filters and plug-ins for a specific media file they are working with, it also allows them to set up a chain of filters and plug-ins that can be exported into other programs, thus enabling the user to manipulate the media file whichever way that can be imagined.

For example, with GraphEdit I can take an EVO file from an HD-DVD -

- and I can connect it to a transport stream splitter (Haali Media Splitter AR in this case) and then direct the video contained in the EVO file to a decoder (CoreAVC in this case).  By doing this, I can then save this as a GRF file that can be manipulated by other programs, such as a video player or into a video encoder for further compression.

 GraphEdit may seem like a complicated program, but after you fool around with it a little and get a good feel for it, it is a powerful and free piece of Tekware that no digital media enthusiast should be without.

If you’ve recently tried to watch a new release Blu-Ray title, you might have come across some compatibility issues – mainly resulting from the latest anti-pirating ploy by Sony known as BD+.  While many of the older Blu-Ray players have trouble supportingthis highly encrypted form of copyright protection, most frustration has come from enthusiasts looking to make backups of these discs.  A Blu-Ray movie can cost anywhere from $20 to $50 US, so it makes sense that people would want to protect the originals and make a copy – fingerprints and scratches can only be ignored by the player for so long.  To combat this, Sony released BD+, and their analysts claimed BD+ would not be cracked for 10 years

Well. 10 months would have been a more realistic prediction.  Slysoft, an Antigua based software company best known for their highly successful program AnyDVD- a program that removes existing copyright protection and other user-unfriendly features of today’s digital discs – has cracked BD+.  AnyDVD HD now has the ability to decrypt BD+, meaning that users who wish to play or copy their BD+ Blu-Ray dics (all of FOX’s recent movies, for example) can do so on their computer for a small fee. 

Sony has yet to respond, but with each new user-unfriendly feature they implement into Blu-Ray, expect companies like Slysoft to work hard for the consumer, like they have today.  Well done Slysoft, well done.