CED Digest Vol. 5 No. 5

CED Digest Vol. 5 No. 5 • 2/5/2000
From: Cleggsan
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 08:48:00 EST
Subject: Re: Transfer and digitization
To: ceds@teleport.com, aglassel

There are many post-production studio houses that do this type of work. One
that I can recommend to you is Modern Video Film in Burbank, California.
They have all the machinery to do any type of conversion you would want.....
at a price.

Good Luck,
A. Clegg

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Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 23:22:47 -0800
To: Tom Howe <ceds@teleport.com>
From: James Arland Curiel <jacuriel>
Subject: Re: CED Digest Vol. 5 No. 4

Dear Tom,

Thanks for the sending the belts, I have already used them, and will need more.

I wanted to share this with you and others.

I recently purchased sets of discs off of e-bay, and some of the discs
obviously are coming from smoking households.  These discs reek with
cigarette smoke smell, and they have a very fine dust on them.

This dust creates a very grainy picture, gunks up the stylus, and makes the
disc skip a lot.  Rather than throw the discs away, I decided to perform an
experiment.

I purchased a Nitty Gritty cleaning machine four months ago to clean my
vinyl LP's.  This machine is a nice piece of engineering with a special lip
with non-abrasive fibres that has vacuum suction.  A non-residue cleaning
solution is pumped to the fibres which clean the record as it spins.  Then
you push the power button forward and the vacuum suction is turns on and
the cleaning solution and gunk in the grooves are sucked out.

I decided to clean two of the video discs covered with the smoke dust using
the Nitty Gritty machine and the experiment was a success.  I used the
45/78 adaptor for holding my CED's in place because it works by
pressure.  Skipping from the dust was virtually eliminated.

Nitty Gritty is on the web and their machines start around $200.  Maybe
more people should contact them and ask them to make an adaptor for
CED's.  I am.

Peace.

signed James

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Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2000 16:10:01 -0800
From: Barry Rawlins <tralfraz>
To: digest@cedmagic.com
Subject: Let It Be

I just bought a SelectaVision version of The Beatles "Let It Be".
Little did I realize the quandry I've put myself in.  I don't have a
player.  My friend, who's player I was going to borrow, doesn't have a
SelectaVision (he laughed) player.  They don't make 'em anymore and I
really don't want to buy one.  All I wanted was a few good VHS copies.
Do you know anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area that has one to rent
for a weekend?
Barry Rawlins
Santa Clara, CA

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Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2000 14:36:26 -0800
To: digest@cedmagic.com
From: Tom Howe <ceds@teleport.com>
Subject: History Repeating Itself? Betamax and DVD Lawsuits

Hello All:

You may have heard about the suit filed by some Hollywood studios against a
number of web sites providing access to a program called DeCSS that cracks
the DVD encryption code, permitting a DVD to be copied to a computer hard
disk. This program originated as a means for computers running the Linux
operating system to play back DVD's.

Obviously Hollywood doesn't like this, because if cheap DVD-R's become
available, it will possible to copy DVD's the same way audio CD's are being
copied now. The current suit has some interesting parallels to the Betamax
suit twenty years ago.

To summarize that suit, Universal filed suit against Sony claiming the
ability to copy over-the-air broadcasts was a copyright violation. This
trial started on Jan. 30th, 1979, and in October '79 the judge ruled
against Universal stating that it was OK for private individuals to make
copies of broadcasts for their own personal use. At that point most people
thought the issue was over, but on Oct. 19th, 1981 ("Black Monday" on
Sony's calendar) the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the earlier
ruling, in effect stating that off-air recording was illegal and sent the
case back to district court to determine relief. This of course set off a
flurry of speculation about what would happen, ranging from an outright ban
on VCR's to a royalty on every blank tape sold. The issue was finally
resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 17th, 1984 when they upheld the
original court decision. There is even speculation that RCA may have not
canceled the CED system in April 1984 if this final ruling had been
different, as CED sales would have gone up if no more VCR's could be
purchased.

After the 1981 ruling, MPAA president Jack Valenti (also involved in the
current DVD case) suggested a royalty of $50 on each VCR and $1 to $2 on
each blank tape. Perhaps some sort of future royalty system is the goal of
the current suit, as it's not clear how the DeCSS genie can ever be put
back in the bottle.

A crack like this may eventually come along for DIVX discs as well, as
these are essentially DVD's with more robust encryption keys on the video
files contained on the discs.

There's a lot of information on the DeCSS suit on the internet. The
Electronic Frontier Foundation is one jumping off point.

http://www.eff.org
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