It's good to see the behemoth hasn't lost their sense of humor. I wonder if it works with low-flow units as well?

http://www.google.com/tisp/

I'm a modern kind of guy. I have a TiVo. I've burned a DVD. I sometimes even upload photos to my MySpace page when the boss is out of the office. But my friend Bruce was shocked the other day when I told him something that made him choke a little on his Yorkshire tea. We were discussing music downloads and I dropped the bombshell that... I'd recently given up downloading music off the internet. Yes, as ashamed as I am of my technophobic aversion to getting screwed over by the music companies, I feel like I have good reasoning...

I first got into downloading tracks for money with Windows Media Player 9. I'm a PC user, don't own a Mac (not at home at least) and, at the time, the choice of different stores available in WMP was pretty attractive to me. If one store didn't have what I wanted, I could go to another and (sometimes) find it there. So for a few years, I made a sort of committment to WMP and it's collection of music stores. Along I went on my merry way, buying up all the albums I'd never gotten around to owning in my youth. As a single guy with no dependents, I spent a sizable part of my disposable income on music downloads. I probably bought at least 150 albums over the course of a couple of years and built up a large music collection, helped along by the clever "these people also bought..." recommendation engine - the sole purpose of which is to make me buy more stuff than I otherwise would. So, what to do with all that music... play it back, right? Right?

The problems started when I wanted to do anything vaguely interesting with my music - like play it in my car, or move it to another PC. Or copy it to my MP3 player (yes, i'm the only person in the world who bought an iPod "alternative"). Slowly but surely, I discovered that most of my woes were caused by DRM - Digital Rights Management. Tracks I'd bought on Napster would require "authorization" to play back - which would really screw up the auto-playlist feature on my Windows MCE system. I couldn't switch to iTunes - uh, all the CDs I'd ripped and all the music I'd bought on my Windows system were in WMA format - not compatible with iTunes or iPods. Then I heard about the Zune player. "Hooray," I thought. "Problem solved". Then I woke up - nothing I'd bought in the past was going to be compatible with the new DRM format used by the otherwise interesting Zune player. So I couldn't play any of that stuff on a Zune without serious pain.

So, long story short: I gave up. I started buying real CDs again. I start ripping them to MP3 format, so they'd be pretty much guaranteed to play back on anything. And it sounds like Apple and EMI have pretty much come to the same conclusion I did - getting rid of DRM is absolutely the smartest thing that the rights owners can do to make people fall back in love with online music downloads. And Jobs has realized that people will actually PAY for the luxury of being able to do whatever they want with their music - just like they could in the good old days. $1.29 per track to have all my playback woes go away like magic? Sounds a little bit like a ransome demand, sure. But, frankly, I'm willing to I'll pony up to get back to that utopian paradise that saves me a trip to Walmart on a Saturday. I want my beautiful music back, safe and sound - and I want it NOW.

Full Apple/EMI DRM story here.

It was bound to happen... A very clever person has hacked the AppleTV to run OSX, turning the AppleTV box into the cheapest Mac ever (at $300 - OSX license not included!)

The hack was published by an anonymous fella who goes by the alias "Semthex" on his site www.semthex.com. "I removed a cpu check and NX usage from the original source and modified some things in memory managment* as well added a SSS3 emulation. The ATV only has a Pentium M which is not capable of SSE3. Also a issue with granularity of TSC was fixed which may lead to a divided by zero at Pentium M processors (thanks to netkas for pointing me this out)." Well, that's nice and clear then...

The fun 13-step process is not for amateurs (at least, not for amateur amateurs) and putting OSX on your AppleTV can render it useless for audio and ethernet connectivity, which sort of defeats the purpose of it being the ultimate media hub. But, we've read that other enthusiasts have being working around the clock to work around those issues.

For more info, check this site out...

The National Association of Broadcasters convention starts this weekend in Las Vegas. Sonic will be there with a fierce array of BD & HD DVD tools for the pros to create


We've already previewed a couple of annoucements. More on the way!

Sonic Redefines Authoring by Cutting Production Time As Much as 90%

Sonic Streamlines HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc Menu Creation with Designer PS 2.0 Plug-in for Photoshop

New Scenarist V4.3 Streamlines Hollywood Blu-ray Disc Production

MacNN.com gave Toast 8 Titanium 5 stars for its outstanding UI, featureset, and format support.

It is rare when a piece of software works so well that its name becomes synonymous with what it does.

See the full review here...

Microsoft confirmed this week that they'll be sticking to their plan to retire Windows XP from 31 January, 2008. PC manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Toshiba will no longer be able to purchase licenses for XP, forcing them to include Vista on all new PCs sold after this date.

A spokesman for Microsoft said that withdrawing the XP licenses for sale would have no implications for long-term technical support for the product.

Click here for the full story.

My family often complains that I don't send them enough photos of my kids. I want to send them photos, but it's always at the bottom of my list and so it rarely happens. This weekend I decided to do something about it. My goal was to be able to take photos and video from my mobile phone and have them post automatically to a blog. For me, if it isn't automatic, it isn't going to happen.

I chose Vox as my service because it's simple to use and allows for private sharing among friends and family. As with most mobile posting services, Vox works by sending photos and video from a mobile device using a special email address. Once I put the email address into my phone's address book, posting to my account was as easy as sending any other message. The media shows up as a blog post within a few minutes or less.

I've found that video is the best media for this workflow because I can explain what it's about by saying something while I'm capturing the video. Then there's no need to go back and edit picture titles or descriptions.

The web feed readers I used to subscribe to my blog didn't show the multimedia posts for some reason. It's a pretty big shortcoming for people in my network who like to use feed readers. I'm guessing that it's just a glitch that will be fixed in the future.

There are other services that do similar things, like Blogger, LiveJournal, and Photobucket. Take one for a spin and tell us about your experience!

Sorry we've been offline for a couple weeks. So much going on getting ready for MIX 07, a Microsoft technology showcase event in Las Vegas happening next week!

We're cooking up some good stuff for the show. We can't talk about it yet, but here's a hint: "Ag-c." Stay tuned!

If you want to be up to speed on the latest web products and media news, keep an eye on the announcements coming out of MIX next week. There's always more than a handful of breakthrough products or startups with something cool to talk about.

It's 2007 and I finally have a laptop/notebook computer that doesn't suck in some really annoying way.

By the way, did you know that there is (informally) a difference between laptop and notebook computers? The XPS blurs the line by bringing laptop features into a notebook computer. I'll call it a mobile PC for now.

The Dell XPS M1210 is the first mobile PC in its class I've found that has the power and connectivity options to replace a desktop machine for digital media. Usually notebooks (12" screen and lower) are not "media-class" - they have slow hard drives, slow graphics cards, and no integrated DVD player. They are really only good for email, powerpoint, etc.

The Dell XPS gets it right. A 128MB NVidia graphics card, Intel Core2 Duo 2.33MHz CPU, 7200 RPM hard drive, 4 USB ports, 1394/Firewire, Bluetooth, 2GB RAM, 802.11g, built-in web-cam and microphone, built-in DVD+RW, 12" screen (yes, the whole thing is small). It's desktop class in a small form factor, which makes it great for travel and frequent lugging around.


They even got the controls right. The keyboard and trackpad are probably the best I've used on any laptop, and the external controls for audio and DVD are convenient and sleek. There's also an external control for flipping on/off wireless and bluetooth, which is really convenient for conserving power or switching to airplane mode. The integrated webcam flips over 180 degrees so you can get a conference room or your friends in the picture. Tell me iMac isn't just a little jealous on that one.

It's running Vista, which I love oh so much more than XP. In short, I finally don't want to throw my computer through the window, which our IT department is very happy about. Now, if I can just run Vista for 1 year without it slowing down to a crawl (you know what I mean, XP) I'll be thrilled.

(*I should mention that Dell is one of our customers, but if I didn't like the XPS I probably wouldn't have posted anything at all.)

You know how children like to watch the same shows over and over again? I know mine do. We have a Tivo for both TVs in the house, so when we know a particular show is popular, we set it to never delete. The problem is that if a lot of shows are marked to never delete then other shows get deleted too quickly.

To get around this problem, I decided to start archiving shows onto my computer using Tivo Desktop. The auto-transfer-series feature in Tivo Desktop will automatically transfer all shows of a given series, which over time should provide us with a complete set of shows available on demand. Now I don't have to worry about setting any of them to never delete on the Tivo box itself and I don't have to guess which shows my kids will want to watch again (and again).

Once I start to run out of disk space, I suspect I'll start to burn the less popular shows onto DVD, which can be done with Sonic's MyDVD. I love that capability. We already have about ten DVDs worth of archived shows.

Oh man, this is SWEET!!!

The boys and girls of Roxio Labs have been working hard to bring you a brand-spanking-new Labs website, featuring a great new look and feel, better information organization and just plain SEXINESS all around.

Thanks and a big shout out to Tom, Greg and David for putting together such a great place to hang out and discover all things Labs.

Let us know what you think - your suggestions and comments are what keeps Labs going!

All the best

James Manning, Director, Roxio Labs.