The guys over at The Pirate Bay have announced the launch of a new freeware video converter, dubbed the Vio Mobile Video Converter.
The company claims “The ViO mobile video converter converts virtually any web video format file into a file that’s 100% compatible with your portable media device, compressing it up to 20% of its original size without any reduction in image quality. ViO converts your media faster than any tool on the market today.”
The program also “comes complete with general audio/video settings and you can also personalize your ViO experience even more with advanced audio/video settings. For example, you can customize the size of the output file and its BitRate is calculated automatically.”
The site notes the program is also optimized for Blackberry users. Best of all, its free.
Result for: into
Mixtape sites where you can share your music playlists are closing on extinction. RIAA drove Muxtape off in September and now the pressure from the lobbyists has made another mashup, Mixwit, to call it a day.
Mixwit was never sued by RIAA but it was just a matter of time. The service took the songs from the MP3 search engine Seeqpod, which would’ve led them into trouble with RIAA eventually.
Mixwit founder Michael Christoff was interviewed by TechCrunch, “we thought about continuing with mixwit as a company, but we could never get assurance that the future of mixwit would not be hurt by the perceived liabilities of its past so we decided it was time to to shut things down.”
There are a few mixtape sites still keep on rockin’, for example Mixaloo and Mixtube. Let us also hope that the upcoming music startups that consumers so much love won’t be haunted by the industry.
Result for: into
Buyers in Canada will soon be faced with higher prices for blank CDs (CD-Rs), as the Canadian Copyright Board has just increased the levy on the media in an effort to “compensate the music industry for potential duplication of copyrighted material.”
The new levies will increase by 38 percent, to 29 cents. The first levy was implemented in 1999 with the intention of helping to compensate the record industry. The idea is that customers will buy blank CDs to duplicate purchased audio CDs or downloaded albums, which will therefore cause massive losses to the music industry and its artists.
Obviously, the Board has not taken into consideration users who will use the CDs to backup their computers or who will copying their own work.
Secretary General of the Copyright Board of Canada, Claude Majeau added: “Two main factors led the Board to raise the CD levy rate to 29¢. First, the mechanical royalties that record labels pay to record a song onto a prerecorded CD have increased. Second, because consumers now use compression technology when they record music, the average number of music tracks copied onto a CD went from 15 to more than 18.”
