Webware

If you've got an old burned CD or DVD hanging around and want to give it a more attractive home than a 100-disc spindle where it currently resides, you should check out Liquid Mongoose. It's a simple bookmarklet you can save to your browser and call up any time you want to print out a protective (and attractive) cover.

It works for both audio albums and movies as long as you're accessing their information from either Netflix or AOL Music. Once on the album or movie's page you simply click the bookmarklet, then print out the page (while making sure to keep the page scaling to 100 percent).

There is a little bit of elbow grease involved to make your printout actually useful. You can either take the easy way and cut out the square to put into a standard CD jewel case, or you can take this origami approach, which gives you a very slick envelope-like enclosure:

If you're trying to do this with a few dozen albums or movies it's clearly not the easiest way to go about it, but assuming you have a printer, some paper, and a lack of jewel cases--this is the next best thing. Coming in future versions is support for Picasa Web albums.

If you've ever wondered how much you're costing Netflix when you go on those month-long movie binges, you should give Feedflix a go. It takes any one of your personal Netflix RSS feeds and figures out how many movies you're watching per month and what the cost comes out to for each DVD. It also breaks down your biggest return days and how long you tend to keep titles.

Ultimately, most of this information is useless, as with some simple math a Netflix membership tends to end up costing less per-rental after just four DVDs based on the most popular plan. Where you get the value is by coming back a few months later since it keep tabs on your RSS feed over time. You'll then have a better analysis of your watching habits and know if you if you need to get out of the house more often, or if it's time to ditch Netflix altogether.

What makes the service truly interesting is its graphs of other Feedflix users. It will group together this information and anonymize it, giving you a bit of a peek into other people's habits. There are charts of the average rental period, popular plans, and most frequent return days. However, the neatest one of the bunch is the breakdown of other users' queue sizes. According to Feedflix, about a quarter or more of users have queues in the low hundreds which is truly impressive. I'd be very interested to see how this data stacks up with subscriber information from the source.

Feedflix is completely free of charge, however you will need to be a Netflix subscriber (or friends with one) to make use of its data crunching prowess.

FeedFlix does a pretty good job at helping you figure out your rental habits, you just have to set it up with your RSS feed and it will keep tracking you over time.

(Credit: FeedFlix)

You've got to love Web kitsch. The YouTube tube socks probably still take the cake in my mind, but slide show creation tool Animoto's latest offering isn't too shabby either.

Twenty dollars gets your rave-worthy slide shows burned onto DVDs and sent to friends and family members. To go hand in hand with that, the service has also bolstered resolutions two-fold, bumping up the respectable 432x240 videos to 864x480 while simultaneously increasing the frame rate from 15 to 24 fps--the same as a movie projector.

The larger sizes come at a price though. The extra resolutions cost an extra $5, but can be applied to previously created shows. That extra resolution is most noticeable on big-screen TVs and computer displays. The company is making these larger videos available in one of two formats--an ISO file that can be burned straight to DVDs to be playable in set-top boxes (using a program like Nero), as well as a QuickTime MOV file that can be squirreled away on your hard drive or sent to friends using large file transfer and hosting services.

The folks at Animoto have put together a really useful head-to-head demo here, where you can see the standard versus premium videos right next to one another. Below is a still capture from the same shot.

Related: YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do video better

Five bucks makes your videos about twice as sharp as before, which is useful for big-screen TVs and wide-screen computer monitors.

(Credit: Animoto Productions)

Digg exploded into riot on Tuesday.

A story was posted that contained the hexadecimal decryption key that allows Linux users to decode and play HD DVDs. The Digg staff received a request from the Advanced Access Content System License Administrator to remove the story, interpreting the request as following the law and as falling under Digg's preexisting terms of use that prohibit the posting of infringing content. Jay Adelson explained this in his blog post at 1 p.m. on May 1.

Digg getting bombed by HD DVD cracks.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The Digg user community was not to be silenced, and found a way to route around this censorship. Digg users posted links to hundreds of stories that contained the decryption key, and each one was Dugg up, until the entire site seemed to be nothing but a repository for this one string of hexadecimal digits. A few Digg users found their accounts suspended for misuse.

At 9 p.m., Kevin Rose reversed course, with another blog post: "...after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."

This online riot illustrates three points.

1. If a DRM method can be cracked, it will be. And if it is, the crack will get out. It will be printed on T-Shirts or Dugg to high heaven until it becomes as laughable as Rot-13.

2. Laws and lawyers cannot restrain a revolting mob of wanna-be online anarchists. For that matter, even Digg's iconic founders can't control an online horde.

3. Mobs are not smart. Stampeding a server (or a police line or a stadium) makes a strong point and may eventually lead to changes in laws or policies, but there is often a price paid for those actions. In this case, Digg itself may be the price of revolt.

For (much) more on this story, see TechMeme.

iLetYou is a new rental marketplace for DVDs and video games. If you want to rent a disc but don't want to sign up for a membership service like Netflix or Blockbuster, it's a good option. Most rentals are $2 or $3 for a week, with no recurring fee. It's also likely to be more reliable than a user-to-user swapping service like PeerFlix (which I use and like, although I've learned not rely on it).

iLetYou shows you who has the disc you want. You can select a store close to you, one with a good price, or maybe both.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The service also looks like a good bet for mom-and-pop video stores that want to put their rental inventories online. Many neighborhood stores have eclectic collections, but exposing these to a nationwide audience--and managing a mail-order rental system--is beyond their reach. iLetYou puts all stores' rental inventories together in a big pool, which makes the iLetYou storefront potentially very valuable to renters. It's sort of like eBay: the value is in the aggregation of both buyers and sellers. iLetYou makes its money by collecting 20 percent of the rental fee. The service does not yet let store owners do much in the way of independent branding for their own stores. Founder Rodger Visitacion told me he's working on that feature.

Individual users can rent out through iLetYou as well. In other words, now you can turn that old Run Lola Run DVD that you never watch, but can't bear to part with, into a nice little earner.

After talking with Visitacion, I wasn't fully convinced that iLetYou has the details of the mail-order rental business all figured out. What happens if someone says he's returned a disc but the owner said he never got it? Will iLetYou take care of everyone? On the other hand, Visitacion was very smart about how the business was launched: He's campaigned among independent video stores for their business and won a lot of it, so even at this early stage, there is a good assortment of titles available on the iLetYou system.

The service should launch early in April.

See also DVDOvernight.

Netflix has fleshed out some details of its newly announced movie download service. The Watch Now instant viewing service is scheduled to become available to all Netflix subscribers by June. It will launch with just 1,000 titles (movies and TV shows), but the selection will expand thereafter--slowly but surely--to encompass as many of the 70,000-plus titles in the Netflix database as possible. The online viewing feature will be a free addition to existing accounts, with subscribers getting a monthly allotment of online viewing time based on their subscription level. For instance, an $18-per-month plan (three DVDs out at once) garners 18 hours of online viewing time per month.

Movies are delivered directly to a Web browser using a customized plug-in. Further, they're streamed in near real time, not played back after downloading, so the experience should be as close to instant gratification as possible (your broadband bandwidth permitting, of course). For now, the service appears to be limited to Internet Explorer running on a Windows PC (according to an article in the New York Times). Speaking on CNBC's Squawk Box this morning, CEO Reed Hastings described the online viewing feature as being "as easy as YouTube" and "as good-looking as a DVD." The latter half of that statement will be the hard part to pull off: the service's advertised 3-megabit-per-second limitation, while impressive, is less than a third of that offered by DVD--though better compression algorithms and codecs could help negate that. No word on whether audio will be limited to stereo playback or if a DVD-like surround track will be available.

Of course, even (or especially) if the picture is pristine, a lot of folks will prefer to watch the movie on their big-screen TV instead of a PC monitor. Work-arounds exist (many PCs offer a TV output), but it appears Netflix is working on viewing solutions that don't require a PC: "Over the coming years we'll expand our selection of films, and we'll work to get to every Internet-connected screen, from cell phones to PCs to plasma screens. The PC screen is the best Internet-connected screen today, so we are starting there," Hastings says in the press release.

One thing's for sure: given the host of IPTV announcements at last week's CES (as well as Apple TV at Macworld), it appears that 2007 could finally be the breakthrough year for digitally delivered media.

Note: The video walk-through of the Netflix Watch Now service is courtesy of HackingNetflix.com.