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Mortal Online, le MMORPG sand box développé par Star Vault AB, fait à nouveau parler de lui en proposant cette semaine la description d'une fonctionnalité méconnue jusqu'à présent : le système de f...

Thieves have stolen the remains of a billionaire who died in 2006 from his vault in southern Austria, police say.

Thieves have stolen the remains of a billionaire who died in 2006 from his vault in southern Austria, police say.

Loyola University professor George Howard, who interviewed SoundExchange head Jon Simson in an entertaining video back in August, tells us he's been working on a new project: helping Wolfgang's Vault digitize and sell live concert recordings from the MC5 and other legendary acts.

If it owns the recording to one or more of its shows, any band with enough fan interest can sign a non-exclusive deal to sell them through Wolfgang's Vault. Since the band owns the sound recording in these cases, their record label has no claim on any revenue generated from selling the live recordings. The band need only pay the songwriter, assuming they didn't write the songs themselves.

We asked Howard a few questions about how this works in a quick e-mail interview (edited for length and clarity) in order to find out more about these untapped resources, which have lain dormant for too long in many cases.

Wired.com: Who made these recordings? And what should a kid do if he has a great-sounding live recording and want to try to get it distributed? Can they sell it to Wolfgang's Vault somehow?

George Howard, Loyola University, Wolfgang Press: These recordings are/were made by the artists.  I feel that live material has been kept under lock and key by draconian label policies surrounding exclusive artist clauses. In essence, these are untapped assets for artists, that -- prior to Wolfgang's Vault making this offering -- were not being used to their highest and best purposes. Obviously, in today's market, artists need as many revenue streams and promotional opportunities as possible. Selling live music provides a very valuable solution to both.

As for "kids" who want to get their music up on Wolfgang's Vault, currently we're working with artists who either have a following or are actively building one. For them, Wolfgang's Vault can accelerate their growth and provide a new revenue stream.

Wired.com: What's the licensing situation like?  I suppose you don't have to deal with the record label, so it's just the artist and publisher who need to be on-board, right?  How have publishers reacted to this?

Howard: It is admittedly easier when we do deals directly with the artist, but some forward-thinking labels are on board as well.  These distribution deals are non-exclusive. Wolfgang's Vault pays the full statutory rate to the publishers right off the top then takes a 30% admin fee, and remits the remainder to the artist. Publishers are delighted. It's another revenue stream for them; one where Wolfgang's Vault pays the statutory rate... no issues.

Wired.com: When did Wolfgang's Vault start selling these shows?

Howard: It's been gradually rolling out material for sale over the past year. We've built a pretty impressive little catalog of artists including Throwing Muses/Kristin Hersh, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Preservation Hall, Benevento Russo Duo, and, of course, the Wayne Kramer, MC5, DKE material. In the next months we'll be making available material from Dead Confederate, Apollo Sunshine, Steve Wynne/Dream Syndicate and more.

Wired.com: What sort of shows make the most sense to sell online?  Is this something every artist should be doing?

Howard: Every artist should be finding ways to create the social objects that can help build -- as Mark Earls/Seth Godin say -- their tribe. These live show represent a specific moment in time, a document that's part of a greater narrative. Artists should most definitely be making these available both from the social object/marketing approach and the revenue generating possibilities.

Photo: marfis75

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/codecsarentgoodlkepancakes.jpg" width="807" height="414" style="display:block;float:none;" /Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only the concern of AV nerds, anime freaks and hardcore not-so-legal movie downloaders. Now, even the most part-time of geeks has to deal with them, whether they're trying to stream a flick across their house with an Apple TV, dump some video onto their phone or just trying to grab last night's episode of Dexter because they, uh, forgot to renew their Showtime subscription that'll work in their media player. It's messy and annoying, but we're here to clean it up. Take a deep breath./p pYou might recall our discussion about a href="http://gizmodo.com/5048025/giz-explains-why-hd-video-downloads-arent-very-high-def"video bitrates earlier/a, or how much data is packed into a file. As a general rule, more bits per second translates into more betterer quality audio and video. The variable in thatmdash;the other part of the equationmdash;is how the content is compressed and de-compressed. Better compression techniquesmdash;the zen of knowing what bits of data to pull out to make big data chunks smallermdash;make for better quality video while taking up less space on your hard drive. Basically, the part you need to know is that codecs are the software that make that magic happen./p pstrongStandard Standards/strongbr bull; strongH.261/strong is not a term you have to worry about, but it's the technology a href="http://www.javvin.com/protocolH261.html"that most video standards and codecs/a were originally based on. Originating in 1990, it's the first major digital video compression standard, and like other "H" standards, it was developed by the International Telecommunication Union. This one was primarily for teleconferencing over ISDN lines, and as such, it looks like ass./p pbull; strongMPEG-1 Part 2/strong is another oldie, developed by the a href="http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/"Movie Picture Experts Group/a and approved in 1991. (All of the MPEG codecs we talk about, btw, will have an associated layer, since the video section is only part of the full standard, which includes audio and other stuff. MPEG-1 Layer 3, you probably know, is MP3.) Based quite a bit on H.261, a href="http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/frame/research/mpeg/mpeg_overview.html"MPEG-1 was designed to take VHS quality video/a and squeeze it down to a bit rate of about 1.5Mbps, optimized for CD transfers. No surprise, it's the standard used for all VCDs (which can play in most DVD players), but not a standard you would see hanging around today./p pbull; With strongMPEG-2 Part 2/strong, approved in 1994, we're finally talking decent vid. Also known as H.262, since it was developed jointly by the ITU-T and ISO, a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/papers/paper_14/paper_14.shtml"MPEG-2 is an extension of MPEG-1/a that delivers better resolution and higher bit rates (3-15Mbps for standard def and 15-30Mbps for HD). It's the video codec used by DVD and digital television, though now it's slowly being replaced by the more efficient MPEG-4, except on DVDs, where it'll ride out that disc format's lifetime./p pbull; bH.263/b is a href="http://www.phonescoop.com/glossary/term.php?gid=197"designed for sending video over crappy connections/a. So it's used to encode most Flash video and to send video over mobile networks./p pbull; strongMPEG-4/strong is where we really stand right now. It has a much broader scope than past MPEG standards, aiming to tackle both the low end (crappy cellphones on a crappy network) and the high end (Blu-ray). It's still developing, so it's not-so-coincidentally a href="http://www.m4if.org/mpeg4/"where this whole story gets messier/a. There are two relevant parts of the MPEG-4 standard for our myopic video purposes: Part 2 and Part 10mdash;which is also known as H.264 or Advanced Video Coding (AVC). To be clear though, even though they're both part of the MPEG-4 standard, they're itotally different formats/i. Nevertheless, both are more efficient at compression than past MPEG codecs, delivering better quality using less space./p pbull;Okay, so if you've ever frequented a Torrent site, you've actually watched tons of videos that use strongMPEG-4 Part 2/strong, though it's not like they would've had a flashing sign telling you so. MPEG-4 Part 2 actually a href="http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:2-AcZvq6F8YJ:www.mpegif.org/public/documents/vault/m4-out-30037.pdf+mpeg-4+profileshl=enct=clnkcd=4gl=usclient=firefox-a"has different "profiles"/amdash;the two that matter being Simple Profile, for low bitrate, low-res stuff, and Advanced Simple Profile. The latter profile is what's used by movies you would download in formats like DivX or XviD or 3ivxmdash;which are all codecs that are essentially just differing implementations of the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard./p pbull;strongMPEG-4 Part 10/strong, the other part, was actually co-devopled by MPEG and the ITU-T, so it's also knownmdash;in fact, more commonly knownmdash;as H.264. It's more efficient than MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2, delivering the same quality video in as little as half the space, making it suitable for the low and high-end. Because of this, it's quickly becoming a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC_Products_and_Implementations"the standardest standard/a. It's part of the HD DVD and Blu-ray spec, replacing MPEG-2 in digital TV (like with satellite services and ATT's U-Verse IPTV) and supported by pretty much every portable video player on the planet from the iPod to the PSP. Apple has a decent, if Kool-Aid flavored, a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/faq.html"FAQ about H.264/a./p pbull;strongVC-1/strong is essentially a a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/vc1techoverview.aspx"Microsoft developed alternative video codec/a to H.264 released as a standard by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, though it descends from the same H.26X/MPEG family. (It essentially started life as WMV9, but then a href="http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=50500181"Microsoft shopped it to the SMPTE/a to make it an industry standard, and now it is.) It too, is part of the mandatory Blu-ray and HD DVD spec, and is the official video codec of the Xbox 360. It's pitch is the same as H.264'smdash;trying to deliver better quality using less space, like HD video in 6-8Mbps./p pstrongFree-Floating Codecs/strongbr Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of emall of those/em, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (a href="http://www.divx.com/"proprietary/a) and a href="http://www.xvid.org/"XviD/a (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/xbox-360-divx%5Cxvid-test/xbox-360-divxxvid-tested-it-plays-almost-everything-329769.php"Like the Xbox 360/a, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common. Same deal with H.264: Some well known codecs that use it are Apple's Quicktime H.264, x264 and Nero Digital. You've also got Windows Media Video (WMV) codecs, which are Microsoft's proprietary twists on industry standards./p pstrongContainers aka Wrappers/strongbr Alright, well you've probably noticed that none of your video files have the extension .h264 or .vc1 or the like. That's because videos are packaged in a href="http://www.doom9.org/glossary.htm#Container"containers or wrappers/a that stuff things like the audio, navigational info, etc. along with the video in a single pretty file. Naturally, there are about as many of them as there are codecs. To be clear, you would take a video encoded with, say, H.264, and wrap it up as a .MP4 file./p pThe majors ones are:br bull;AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is a href="http://www.jmcgowan.com/avi.html#Definition"Windows' standard multimedia container/abr bull;MPEG-4 Part 14 (known to you as .mp4) is the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4"standardized container for MPEG-4/abr ·:FLV (Flash Video) is the a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/"format used to deliver video through Flash Player/abr bull;MOV is Apple's QuickTime a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/"container format/abr bull;OGG is an a href="http://www.xiph.org/"open standard container/abr bull;MKV (Mastroska) a href="http://www.matroska.org/"is another open specification container/a that you've seen if you've ever downloaded animebr bull;VOB a href="http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/vob.cfm"stands for DVD Video Object/a. Guess what? It's DVD's standard container, and what you get when you rip a DVD.br bull;ASF is a a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/asfspec.aspx"Microsoft format designed/a for WMV and WMA. (Files can end in .wmv or .asf)./p pSo, in order to play a video file, your setup has to be able to handle both the actual video codec, and the container. It's why you can try to play an AVI file and Windows Media Player laughs at you, even though it totally played one a minute agomdash; the container was no problem, it didn't have the right codec. Or conversely, even though an iPod could play back an H.264 encoded video, if it was wrapped up in MKV, it couldn't read it./p pOkay, my brain hurts. Hopefully this will make yours hurt less when it comes to dealing with pesky videos. If you'd like to do even more homework, Wikipedia, as always, has a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_codecs"a more in-depth discussion/a. And Doom9 a href="http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-final-105-1.htm"is always an amazing resource/a for all things digital video./p pemSomething you still wanna know? Send any questions about codecs, kitties or pad thai (but not RealMedia) to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line./em/p p[Image: a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siebeneinhalb-de/2385134555/"ME/a@Flickr]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=8b16e36f57caf7463dda52b4758c5125amp;p=1"img style="border:0;" src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=8b16e36f57caf7463dda52b4758c5125amp;p=1" border="0" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=FxSbpUqh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=6oQdGflA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=qLBnOvuS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=qLBnOvuS" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=pIR4dxIP"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=pIR4dxIP" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/q1B1QOVLsx0" height="1" width="1"/

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It's time for us to take matters into our own hands. nbsp; nbsp; We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we've figured a better way to get our own back: We've launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube. nbsp; nbsp; No more of those crap quality videos you've been posting. We're giving you the real thing - HQ videos delivered straight from our vault. nbsp; nbsp; What's more, we're taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what's even more, we're letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there!