Hadopi report says piracy dropped in France by between 17% and 66% during 2011, while Hadopi was in force; however the SEVN report on 2011 notes that legitimate sales of video dropped by 2.7%, ironically blaming 'the continually high level of piracy despite counter measures adopted under the HADOPI law' (http://www.dvd-intelligence.com/display-article.php?article=1676), and the SNEP report on 2011 sales of audio indicates that the market dropped by 3.9% (http://www.telecompaper.com/news/french-online-music-worth-eur-110-mln-in-2011-study). Hard not to come to a conclusion that actions against piracy do not improve sales

36 minutes long. Actually BRILLIANT

'XBMC Plugin for browsing and watching RTE Player streams, TV3 streams and TG4 streams (Ireland only), An Lár TV and Magnet WebTV' (via John Looney)

"They did not have the right to sell it and have infringed his copyright. It is as simple as that." Scummy -- some company called "News Team International" taking YouTube content and passing it off as their own

great UI for a little Dublin oral-history site -- just a GMaps mashup with links to YouTube, but it works very well

A Dublin mystery solved! those white plaster statues that covered Dublin, appearing in almost every council house window, explained

just about right (via Waxy)

'we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.'

'Using Boxee to play local files? having issues? Here's what were going to do about it.' It's amazing to see this level of responsiveness from an appliance vendor!

drat, my old Dell laptop I'm using as a Boxee platform (which can't keep up with 720p) doesn't have a mini-PCIe slot either :(

ouch - master key for HDMI now available, if true (via tony finch)

AWS-based service to resize images, encode video files, extract thumbnails, and store to S3, for use by third-party web apps. Transcoding-as-a-service

good idea -- generate a mencoder command-line using a friendlier Javascript single-page UI (via OMGUbuntu)

$99, 10-watt, fanless device to stream HD1080p video, in pretty much any format, from a network server to your TV. crazy. quite competitive with the Acer Aspire Revo; downside: less open

open audio/video for the web, from Google; VP8 video codec, Ogg for audio, and a subset of Matroska as the container format. still a patents minefield, though, I'd guess

interview with the guy behind the "Magnasanti" video. [Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi] 'presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar - depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society - with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.' WHOA

SnapStream's 100TB rack which records 50 analog TV channels simultaneously

SMB setup details

'a homebrew media player for the Nintendo Wii. It was initially created as a fork of Team Twiizers' port of MPlayer, combining elements of MPlayerWii, GeeXboX and other great homebrew contributions.' recommended by conoro

'This clip is raw from Camera E-8 on the launch umbilical tower/mobile launch program of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. This is an HD transfer from the 16mm original. The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time.'

woo, interesting stuff on the Wii homebrew scene! MPlayer CE is apparently quite promising

Soviet animators' cartoons based on classic sci-fi

600 euros all-in for an entry-level DLP home cinema projector capable of 720p HD. tempted, but stil a bit pricey

worth it for #10: 'Capture video of a linux desktop': '$ ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg'

whoa. really looking forward to this, Mass Effect was one of the best games I've ever played

flipping amazing stop-motion LEGO animation paying homage to classic C=64 and NES gaming, featuring International Karate, Pong, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, and Pac-Man from swedish duo Rymdreglage (via Conor)