The morons at Disney decided for some reason to not put the comentaries on the Toy Story and Toy Story 2 R4 DVDs. But don't fret, some nice person has Quicktimed the audio with que images and they've even done the NTSC->PAL 4% speed up! Get Toy Story 1 commentary here and Toy Story 2 commentary here. The page author makes the point that although this isn't really 100% spot on legal, you'd need to have bought the DVD anyone to get a lot out of it, and we Aussies have absolutely no other options to hear these commentaries so nerr.

Subject URL: Canibal The Musicial Online

Canibal The Musical, a Trey and Matt (of South Park fame) musical worth seeing if only to hear their musical beginnings and a blueprint of the South Park the movie format. It's now availble online for US$1.95 for 3 days viewing, or join the site to view everything there for US$4.95 a month. All using Windows Media Rights Management 7, the least terrible of all the Rights Management systems out there (if set up properly). Pay per View video is one of the few areas I can see likely to succeed (for the next few months anyway) with such systems. It's already much too late for audio thanks to Napster.

While you're at it, you can view all the recent Tropfest videos for a month for AUS$5 using similar technology.

It's amazing but people seem much happier to pay to view video (which is even now with high bandwidth, extreamly average quality) than paying for audio...

Subject URL: CDDB tightening the reigns

The user built CD database CDDB, recently bought by Gracenote has been tightening it's usage. Software can still use the database of album titles and track listings for free but must prevent the usage of any other CD databases and must prevent exporting the database to other programs. This technically takes my new favourite program Exact Audio Copy off the list. It is still working though....

This slashdot thread on the topic explains exactly what is going on and the results, and also informs how to use FreeDDB instead.

Subject URL: Tipster

Today I simply link you to Tipster. It has a very good coverage of copyright protection and the weekend Napster decision (as well as the usual discussions of alternate payment methods for artists).