In a press release, AT&T today announced that Nero is the newest licensee of its MPEG-4 video worldwide licensing program. The patents underlying this global licensing effort are considered essential to the practice of the MPEG-4 video standard.

AT&T says that it is working to ensure that all providers of MPEG-4 compliant products and services have an opportunity to take a license to AT&T’s MPEG-4 patents, omitting the need for AT&T to enforce proper payments in the chain of distribution.

Seems like patented standards (with licensing fees) are becoming more of a norm rather than an exception.

On July 14th, the name “MP3″ celebrates its tenth anniversary. On this day back in 1995, the researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS decided to use “.mp3″ as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Soon MP3 became the generally accepted acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 “MPEG Audio Layer 3″.

.mp3 emerged as the unanimous winner of an internal poll at Fraunhofer IIS. In an email dated July 14th 1995, the new file extension was proclaimed:

Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 12:29:49 +0200
Subject: Layer3 file extension: .mp3

Hi all,

this is the overwhelming result of our poll: everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3! As a consequence, everyone please mind that for WWW pages, shareware, demos, and so on, the .bit extension is not to be used anymore. There is a reason for that, believe me :-)

Juergen Zeller

(translated from German)

This naming can be seen as the conclusion of years of research and development in a team of up to 40 engineers. The format’s international standardization in 1992 ensured worldwide compatibility - this fact and the public MP3 source code guarantee that billions of existing MP3 files can still be played by generations of audiophiles to come.

In 1987, the Fraunhofer IIS started to work on perceptual audio coding in the framework of the EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). In a joint cooperation with the University of Erlangen (Prof. Dieter Seitzer), the Fraunhofer IIS finally devised a very powerful algorithm that is standardized as ISO-MPEG Audio Layer-3 (IS 11172-3 and IS 13818-3).

In 1992 MP3 was in fact so far ahead of its times, that the industry considered the technology far too complex for practical application. It turned out, however, that its development was the bottom line advancement in audio coding - no other coding method so far could uncrown MP3 as the standard for digital music on the computer and on the Internet.

EE Times reports that Amino Communications is pushing their set top boxes to the hotel business. These boxes are able to stream MPEG-4 from the net, bringing us a little closer to the vision of true IP TV delivery to the home. However, for some inexplicable reason, the powers-that-be at Amino decided not to equip this puppy with HD capabilities. Go figure.

Ulf Harnhammar has reported a bug in GNU GZip. The issue manifests when gunzip is invoked on a malicious archive using the ‘-N’ switch. An archive containing an absolute path for a filename that contains ‘/’ characters, results in the file getting written using the absolute path contained in the filename. A remote attacker may leverage this issue using a malicious archive to corrupt arbitrary files with the privileges of the user that is running the vulnerable software.

More info on both expolit and solution is available.

Bugtraq ID: 13290
CVE: CAN-2005-1228

After recent Zlib buffer overflow mess, this seems like a tough week for compression guys.

I love the VLC media player for many reasons, not the least of which is that it lets me play DVDs on my notebook without having to pay for some POC commercial product with fewer features and less flexibility. On top of that, the player works on just about every platform in the world. Version 0.8.2 has the usual roster of awesome enhancements, including some that are pretty obscure, like support for the Dirac codec. Check out the list here and start salivating.

WinRK v2.1.3 beta has just been released.
While this version contains many bug fixes, the biggest news is the improvements made to the PWCM codec plugin.
The PWCM algorithm has been optimised further for speed, allowing us to add more modelling and tune it for futher compression improvements. Along with some modifications made to the text filtering, this method now compresses significantly better, especially on large text data sets.

Also, in an attempt to investigate more practical uses for the underlying PAQ weighting technology, we have created some hybrid LZP/PWCM modes called FPW (Fast Paq Weighting). These modes try to trade off speed for compression ratio, providing four different speed levels.

Another feature of note was added to the Shell Extension. It now provides a property sheet for all handled archive types, displaying archive properties.

Please, download the new version today and enjoy all the new features!

New Scientist has an article on how government denies (or rather bans) many technologies from getting patented (or even bieng disclosed further) in the name of national security.

Chances of any data-compression related technology to possibly become a victim of it sure seem low but it still sounds interesting.

(Complete article is only available to subscribers, update: you might want to note in any article such as this one that you can often get into the site with a username/password combination from bugmenot.com. Unfortunately, the database has a lot of stale entries for pay sites like newscientist.com, but it’s usually worth a try.)

The IEEE Class of 2005 Fellows holds a couple of notable fellow travelers: Yung-Chang Chen of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwin for contributions to low bit rate modeling based coding, and Alan V. McCree of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory for contributions to low bit-rate coding of speech signals.

You can have good luck searching for papers of the first honoree on CiteSeer with a search term of “Y. C. Chen”, but things are not so good for Dr. McCree. His many years at Texas Instruments in Dallas didn’t yield a big bibliography. I guess that industry is a lot more interested in profits than publications.

You’ll want to block out some time to visit beautful Adelaide, Australia for the 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, scheduled for September 4 through 9. Of course, the call for papers deadline is long past, but you can still hobnob to advance your career. You’ll be drooling over the preliminary program, especially when you see that Jacob Ziv is presenting a paper. That alone is worth the world’s most grueling air trip from the states.

I guess it goes without saying, but anyone nice enough to mail me a copy of the proceedings CD will be nominated for sainthood.

A serious security flaw (buffer overflow) has been identified in Zlib, the widely used data compression library. Fixes have begun to appear, but a large number of programs are affected. Read more here and here and here.