Zudeo

I saw on Slashdot today that BBC will be releasing some of their old shows on the Azureus network. Maybe I've had my head in the sand lately (I have been busy with other things) but I thought Azureus was a Java based bittorrent client. Turns out that Zuedo is a website hosting torrents of various videos. They show a screenshot of a "Zuedo" client on the homepage, but it is just a copy of Azureus 2.5 (despite the fact that the site is "powered by Azureus 3.0", which I don't think is out yet). This could be because I'm using Linux though, maybe you get something different on a Windows machine. Anyway, they have a bunch of video available right now, mostly trailers and open source films but it looks like there should be more soon. It does work pretty well, the torrents are automatically loaded into Azureus using javascript (On my machine Azureus has to be running when I click the link). You might as well give it a try, and hopefully we will see more content soon. I guess if this one got past me, it probably got past everyone else as well.

Old Movies

Quick post tonight (haven't been many lately, sorry),
Anyway,

If you have a lot more time than I do you and a fast Internet connection you might want to look into watching some old movies. Very old movies have run out of copyright, and are now freely available on the net (like the Project Gutenberg books). One way is to get them from the Public Domain Movie torrents site. This site has a number of old movies available using bittorrent (to save the server bandwidth). You can also find a huge amount of old video on Archive.org (Check out their whole moving pictures section or skip right to the Prelinger Archives for the old stuff).

Perfect for long trips if you have a Pocket PC or recent Palm.

DRM

DRM or Digital Rights Management has gotten a bad reputation lately, and rightfully so. Music/Movie/Game companies putting unreasonable restrictions on their products such that they become unusable to the rightful purchaser. Technology such as FairPlay which serves only to annoy legitimate purchasers, but doesn't actually stop determined people from copying music (see PlayFair, now QTFairUse) .

Anyway, the real point of this post is to point out a particularly creative approach to DRM, education. Weird Al's "Don't Download This Song".



Of course, If you haven't already, some of his other songs are good too.

Happy Watching /Listening, and Remember: No Stealing Music!