Someone should really print this on a T-Shirt. You know Disney, “New” Viacom, TimeWarner, News Corporation, Bertelsmann AG, and General Electric together own more than 90% of the media holdings in the United States. I have no numbers for the world here, but just do a little research 

Sources

• http://invisiblethings.org/papers/redpill.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership

But it’s like browsing mp3.com in the old days and you can find great new artists. Just downloading promo MP3s is stress since you have to be logged in now.

I tried for over 30 minutes to login and request a new password. The „Forgotten Password“ mails never arrived, using fake accounts did not work, and after i finally got a userrname/password from a friend it told me to enter CAPTCHA and then told me „too much login retries“. If DoS-attacks would be legal you know i would have destroyed their servers! Damn you myspace! After trying to contact myspace and seeing an FAQ instead of an e-mail or contact-form i was finaly pissed off.

I must say my dear artists: if a user cannot download any promo MP3s you’re lucky if user remember a bands name. As it goes for me i don’t make any notes. Sometimes I just bookmark some cool artists and then again forget them. It doesn’t often happen that i immediately buy an album – and you probably know i dislike iTunes. So if i don’t find it – no work.

Myspace is indeed censoring an artists promo actions by having the user need to register (and this just doesn’t really work).

But i didn’t give up…

…and so i found finally a way download my promos by using the nice service from File2HD. But i shall inform you that you’re not allowed to, since – according to File2HD – you need rights to access the original files the artists uploaded.

Anyway, as it goes for File2HD, it just demonstrates how weak those crappy commercial sites are coded. Almost every major social platform has major security leaks – otherwise downloads won’t be possible. I just want to encourage the guy behind the site to continue his war against the copyright mafia.

And since the service puts out nice URL-lists not only for myspace but also for YouTube including HiQuality Downloads i just can recommand it. Use it at your own risk!

P.S.: Have you ever disassembled the YouTube Flash Player? Have a nice day…

I hate all those low quality videos from YouTube. You know there is that trick to concenate &fmt=18 to YouTube-URLs to have it access the new servers with higher quality videos and better bandwidth performance, but still that does not makes me happy.

Having FLV is ok for me, although I dislike non-standard container formats. But the point is copying those FLVs for friends often ends up by them complaining not beeing able to play the files on their Windows or Mac. The same problem persists on the iPod or my mobile phone that just understands 3GP in the moment.

So i end up having to convert the files… or transcoding them.

Conversion vs. Transcoding

Converting usally means decoding the video to a full video-picture – probably with or without any post-processing– and loosing the visual information that was artifically added again by encoding. Also, most of the  bitstream-information on the decoded stream is also lost, because you only see a the picture and not what abstract data is behind.

That is the place where transcoding comes into play: It transcodes the data be going deep into the input stream directly translating it the the output stream. The “visual step“ between encoding and deocoding is skipped, because not necessary. In the end we have not only faster conversion process, but have also retained all possible quality. 

Ok, if input and output en/decoding algorithms differ too much or you wanna resize the video you still have to convert the videos. Point is that the algorithms used in input and output stream have to be similar to each other (beeing often MPEG4 on nowadays video material).

I discovered vixy (which is based on ffmpeg) und does a nice job on transcoding. On windows and Mac you have a GUI limited to YouTube. The Online-Converter itself seems to be always overloaded. So, time to compile our FLV 2 MPEG4 Tool ourselves (for Ubuntu/Debian):

A last word to YouTube. I don’t suggest uploading to it in no way!

• They manipulate view counters on videos with strong political content (e.g. 200 views and 300 comments?)
• Everything you upload, belongs to them! Read the terms!
• Quality still sucks  (it’s for the american market; but we have broadband here in germany!)
• Servers are often damn slow, espacially at 23:00 CEST+1 when all americans go on the site

Here’s a list of security programs I usually install on our root-servers. Better install now, before you have a compromised system and you can’t tell what exactly happened:

• snoopy – logs sheel commands via execve()
• tiger – security audit for linux systems
• chrootkit – checks for rootkits
• checksecurity – basic system checks
• munin – tiny and fine; the plugin interface is very easy
• mod_security – Security Module for Apache
• debsecan – checks your installed packages for security problems
• vnstat – Network traffic monitor
• htop – Better top
• mtop – The same for MySQL
• ntpdate - Server ought to have to right time!

If anyone know other good tools suggestions are welcome. And don’t forget to enable apache logging