The Beatles may hit streaming music services by Christmas
The Beatles haven’t exactly been in a rush to embrace the online music world — there’s iTunes, Rock Band and that’s about it. However, they might be making up for lost time. Billboard sources claim that the British pop rock legends will make their catalog available on Christmas Eve… you know, next Thursday. It’s unclear as to which services will be offering the Beatles, but talks for a half-year exclusive at an unknown service apparently “fizzled out.” It’s not a repeat of Apple’s ongoing lock on downloads, then.
None of those involved are commenting on the supposed leak, but there is reason to believe that you’ll be streaming “Strawberry Fields Forever” in the future. Remember how the band members’ solo work reached iTunes in the run-up to the Beatles launch? Well, it’s happening again at places like Apple Music and Spotify. Heck, the group now has multiple music videos on YouTube (see below for proof), where bootlegs used to dominate. And while Paul McCartney was once down on the whole idea of streaming, he changed his mind on that a long, long time ago. Besides, the group may have little choice when streaming is increasingly the format of choice. The last thing it wants is a generation that has never heard John, Paul, George and Ringo performing together.
[Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images]
Via: Spin
Source: Billboard
Video license deal protects the future of 4K
The future of 4K video has been in doubt as of late. You see, the HEVC Advance group that’s licensing the H.265/HEVC video format (crucial to stuffing 4K into modern data pipes) wanted steep royalties seemingly everywhere, with no cap — even free services faced a small outlay. It was so pricey that tech giants started work on their own royalty-free format to avoid being on the hook. At last, though, HEVC Advance has seen the light: it’s offering a revamped licensing scheme. While it could still be costly for some, it’s inexpensive enough that it might safeguard the future of 4K content.
The new approach not only cuts rates by as much as half, but sets yearly caps between $2.5 million to $40 million per year, depending on the service or device type. Tech giants like Apple, Netflix or Samsung won’t lose a significant chunk of their profit just to handle 4K, in other words. Moreover, any content that’s completely free for viewers is now royalty-free. Public TV and ad-supported websites won’t have to worry about coughing up cash.
This won’t necessarily stop work on alternatives to HEVC, but it could prevent a lot of headaches with trying to create or switch to other 4K-friendly video standards, like Google’s VP9. You may see HEVC in many more places than it would have gone otherwise, especially on low-profit devices like budget smartphones. Also, it could prevent some current 4K TV sets from becoming paperweights. Many of them support HEVC video, but it’s less certain that they’ll play VP9 properly or at all, even with an update. So long as the format takes off at all, you’ll still be using that set when 4K is truly mainstream.
[Image credit: Jack Dempsey/Invision for LG/AP Images]
Via: Forbes
Source: HEVC Advance (PDF)
VLC finally available for Chrome OS
When in doubt of whether you’ll be able to play some obscure media file or not, just download VLC. That has been our philosophy for a long time. VLC is famous for supporting the largest variety of media formats. I have personally never encountered a file which doesn’t work with this player, and now Chrome OS users can finally enjoy it.
This happens to be huge news, as Chrome OS was one of the last major operating systems without official VLC support. VLC is pretty much everywhere right now. There are versions for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and OS X, as well as more obscure operating systems like Solaris, Haiku, ReactOS and others.
Chrome OS was certainly late to the party, but that is due to very valid reasons. Adopting solutions like PPAPI, NaCL and Javascript would require rewriting all the code and would bring some issues to the database. Of course, this was before Google announced ARC (Android Runtime for Chrome), a feature that would allow Chromebooks to run Android apps.
See also: 15 best Android apps of 2015
This changed everything for VLC. They were able to keep 95% of the code they already had, and adapting the rest to work with the web-based operating system. The final result is an application that works just as well as all other VLC versions.
It supports the same video and audio formats, as well as subtitle files. You can even play streams. Other supported features include playlists, accelerated playback, an audio equalizer, audio/video synchronization and hardware-accelerated video/audio decoding.
The only trick here is that the team has only tested it with two Chrome OS devices: the Chromebook Pixel and the HP Chromebook 14, which are the only two machines the team had access to. Please do test it on your own devices, though, and try to report any bugs you find.
Ready for some mad media playback? Just click through the button below to download the app from the Chrome Web Store. And don’t forget to hit the comments and let us know how VLC for Chrome OS is treating you!
Chrome will soon stop supporting weak SHA-1 certificates
Google hasn’t had confidence in SHA-1’s — the algorithm used for encryption by most SSL certificates, which add the “s” to https:// — ability to keep your info safe for a long time. Now, the company is determined to stop supporting it and has revealed when it plans to do so. According to Google’s Online Security blog, Chrome version 48 (currently in beta) will show a message that says “Your connection is not private” starting early next year whenever it detects an SHA-1-based certificate issued on or after January 1st, 2016.
Mountain View says it’s hoping you don’t ever encounter the message, because Certificate Authorities are required to stop issuing SHA-1 certificates in 2016. Just in case, Google plans to continue issuing warnings until Chrome completely stops supporting SHA-1 on January 1st, 2017. When that day comes, a website that still uses the function will trigger a fatal network error.
SHA-1 has been growing weaker and more insecure everyday for a decade now, which is dangerous considering we tend to trust websites with “https://” in their URLs. Other browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge also plan to stop supporting it in an effort to encourage website owners to switch to more secure SHA-2 certificates as soon as possible.
Source: Google Online Security
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