Despite some sites reporting that “Slysoft has been beaten”, the Antiguan company renowned for promoting Fair Use Rights has effectively defeated BD+ once again and much earlier than expected; the cat and mouse game of DRM has entered the next round.

Although newer BD+ decryption wasn’t expected until February 2009, today’s AnyDVD HD 6.5.0.2 release decrypts copy protection on all current Blu-ray movies and, in turn, ensures that consumers may continue to backup and enjoy their Blu-ray movie purchases even when using computer monitors that are not HDCP compliant. In fact, Anydvd HD remains the only program that can decrypt all commercial Blu-ray releases, and this incredible magic is, as per usual with Anydvd HD, performed on the fly without requiring users to rip first to their hard drives.

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The award winning ConvertXtoDVD, PhotoDVD, CopyToDVD and all other VSO Software products are discounted at -20% for the holiday season! Here is your chance to get legit copies of high quality software at a reduced price. We especially recommend the ConvertXtoDVD which is absolutely the best video to DVD-R conversion solution on the market. It produces awesome DVD compatible copies of your .AVIs, .WMVs, .MOVs, .MP4s and just about any type of video file you throw at it. The conversion process is fast, image quality great and the software is extremely easy to use while it also offers advanced settings for the experienced users. You’ll have your very own DVDs with menus and subtitles recording virtually in just a few minutes and mouse clicks! All you have to do is use the coupon code XMAS2008 during your purchase.

Download the free fully functional trial versions of the software from HERE or proceed directly to the purchasing page HERE.

This is a review-like story about my experiences with the Archlinux Linux distribution. I’ve been using Arch for half an year now and I’ve been quite impressed with it. Before I start, I should mention something about my previous experiments with different Linux distributions.

Nine months ago I installed PCLinuxOS as my Linux first distribution. Back then I didn’t have any idea about the Linux’s filesystems, package management or any other features either. I had been using Windows all my life, so I was a complete newbie. To put the long story short: the installation went well, I got to install most of the applications I wanted, but there were few drawbacks. I couldn’t get my soundcard working and I couldn’t write to my NTFS partitions at all. When googling information to solve my problems I constantly ran into Archlinux’s wiki pages. Of course, it didn’t help me much since I wasn’t using the Archlinux at the time. After weeks of googling, I gave up and decided to install Archlinux.

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For the last year we have had the habit of summarizing the latest release cycle of Linux distributions, and let the fall of 2008 be no different. This time around the decision was easier than ever and I must say that there isn’t even serious competition to which distro shall the award go to.

As before our focus is on typical desktop and Internet usage, seeking an open-source alternative to Windows. We value a good out-of-the-box experience, polished desktop design and usability over other features.
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Good sign for the hardware vendors and bad for the film studios? The high definition AVCHD format is being adopted by the Hong Kong pirated copies producers, as is used for creating Blu-ray imitations of feature films. The AVCHD format is supported by Sony PlayStation 3 console, as well as some Blu-ray players (although not all of them). It’s a good sign for hardware vendors as piracy is usually the result of a unbalanced supply vs. demand on the market. This means that the high definition formats have penetrated the market with suffiecient volumes, so that the pirated copies produces see it as a potential market. The film studios are obviously seeing the same phenomena with every video format generation.

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When Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical/Ubuntu, made the comment that Ubuntu should be prettier than Apple OSX in near term I got excited - the man was absolutely right. It doesn’t matter how customizable and operating is, or how good can you make it look with some effort if it does look bad out of the box. The out-of-the-box experience is the key to reach the average users, and if that is not aesthetically pleasing a lot of effort is needed to win the user back. Interestingly Ubuntu with their orange/brown themes and very basic Gnome looks is possibly the worst looking distribution out of the major players. So here comes release 8.10, the Intrepid Ibex - a first step to the direction of making Ubuntu look good? We’ll see about that…

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VSO Software’s ConvertXtoDVD is without any doubt the leading video to DVD conversion software. It combines unbeatable ease of use, advanced features and a great combination of video processing speed and quality. The software has matured over the years to support just about every format on the market, but VSO continues to release new versions with small improvements. The latest v3.2.1.55 update adds support to .MTS file format introduced by certain Sony camcorders. They have also done some bug fixes and improved the Matroska (.MKV) demuxer and so on.

Link: ConvertXtoDVD version history
Download now: Click here
ConvertXtoDVD video guide: Click here

It’s about time - finally there is a high quality replacement for the discontinued Google Browser Sync. It was a tool to synchronize the bookmarks and passwords of multiple copies of Firefox web browser. As it was a Mozilla Firefox extension, it was a multi-platform solution allowing you to keep your web browser data synchronized even across platforms, like Linux and Windows for an example. But Google decided to pull the plug on this service as Firefox was updated to version 3. Once you are accustomed to the practicality of such service it is hard to live without. The only replacement was Mozilla Weave, which introduces more problems than it solves. Weave is slow, unreliable and practically seems to kill Firefox at least in Linux environment when performing the background synchronization. But fortunately you can now kiss Weave goodbye as the latest version of Foxmarks supports password synchronization - and it does it well.

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Or does it just simply fail? I have always rated Mandriva’s releases highly, and the past year has been especially good for them as the 2008 and 2008.1 have been awesome releases. Therefore the expectations were high when I was loading the Mandriva One 2009 edition to my IBM Thinkpad. After all Mandriva was the first one of the major distributions that would use KDE4 as the primary desktop environment, introducing the ‘next generation of desktop environments’ to the mainstream.

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XBMC Media Center has an interesting history, as it originates from the Microsoft Xbox game console - thus the name XBMC (Xbox Media Center). It has a long history as the project goes back to as far as the year 2002. XBMC can be considered as one of the killer applications for the original Xbox as it managed to expand the game console into a full blown media center that could playback Divx/AVI video, MP3s and just about any media content of that time. As time passed on and the original Xbox became a legacy product, the project was steered to new paths: They began porting it to GNU/Linux, Max OSX and Windows. As a result their next major release is now at Beta 2 stage, and available for all supported platforms, and believe me that it is a beauty.

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