Ears On

The new TiVo Series3 is HD-capable, CableCARD-savvy, and limited to "35 hours of HD goodness," note the folks at Engadget HD. And so a tutorial on the new Engadget offshoot walks you through the process of upgrading the drive with lots of pictures (and some assistance from DealDataBase and TiVoCommunity). The proccess is part physical, part typing into a character-based BIOS interface. Be warned that you'll need a TORX 10 screwdriver and there's some real danger from opening up any product with a power supply (so don't do it, our lawyers would no doubt advise). If you're not suicidal, or mechanically inclined, or the memory of DOS gives you nightmares, WeakKnees will do the upgrade for you, replacing the 250GB TiVo drive with 750GB. But it doesn't hurt to watch, does it? Engadget HD has been running for a few months and worth regular visits.

I told you so. Google's acquisition of YouTube has gotten a lot of attention for its $1.65 billion pricetag. But that's not the end of the story. Chapter two of the YouTube saga will be an elaborate dance with copyright laws—and holders. Stephen Colbert's comic diatribe ("the way I see it, you owe me $700 million") is only the tip of the iceberg. There will be purges, of course, including 30,000 items deleted at the demand of the the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers. YouTube had quietly started changing its business model a month before the acquisition by signing a deal with Warner Music that will allow revenue sharing for music clips, even those, um, unofficially uploaded by fans. There's a new concept: file sharing retroactively made legal! The rapprochement may be traced back to February when Saturday Night Live aired a rap parody featuring Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell called "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia." Reports Business Week: "NBC asked YouTube to pull the video down, and YouTube complied. However, after the clip showed up on YouTube, Saturday Night Live's ratings ballooned, says Gerry Kaufhold, an analyst with consultancy In-Stat. In the end, NBC decided to make even more programming available to the site." YouTube's graceful transition from copyright outlaw to media darling may become an influential model—but only for as long as it can ride on the magic carpet of net neutrality. That rug may get pulled from under us at any moment. Will chapter three of the YouTube story be about its death on the information superhighway?

Buying a fancy CD rack may seem counterintuitive in the iPod era. After, even a drop-dead-gorgeous piece of industrial design like the Boltz CD600X2 still takes up space. Isn't it more elegant to rip everything and dump your discs?

Brigitte Bardot's performance of "Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus" was a Top 5 hit when it was released in the 1960s, but until recently, the only way to add it to your music library was to rummage through secondhand shops. But it's back in circulation—not as a CD, but as a download, one of 3000 out-of-print tracks sold by the Universal Music Group over iTunes during the last seven months. More than 250,000 people downloaded a 2000 Christmas compilation by Nana Mouskouri, Les Plus Beaux Noels du Monde, during a period that didn't even include the holiday. Universal plans to follow up in November with 100,000 more albums, many previously released only on vinyl. Record companies have good reason to rediscover their back catalogue: Part of Amazon's success with the "earth's biggest selection" lies in brisk sales of o/p material by third-party merchants. "We are now able to respond to and quantify the appetite for more eclectic, diverse recordings from the past," Universal's Olivier Robert-Murphy told Reuters. The unanswered question: What, if anything, will artists or their estates get paid?

What makes the iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED Special Edition so special? Besides the odd use of caps and parentheses? Well, it's red, and though we've seen that before, it's nice to see it again. That brings the nano color roster up to six along with "silver" (formerly white), black, lime, sky blue, and pink. The price is $199, the capacity 4GB (if you want 8GB, you'll have to settle for black). And all second-generation nanos have battery life of 24 hours, an improvement that should please even the most jaded observer. But the headline-grabber is that for every iPn(P)RSE purchased, Apple will donate $10 to the Global Fund, sending much needed medication to AIDS victims in Africa. Guilty conscience? You can also support the Join Red campaign by purchasing a Motorola cell phone, American Express red card, Gap T-shirt, or Emporio Armani watch. Holiday shoppers: Don't forget to load up on iPod accessories.

The future of HD DVD and Blu-ray is neither boom or bust, according to The State of Home Video (11th Edition) from Kagan Data Services. Kagan sees the two new formats together grabbing 13.9 percent of the market by 2009, 53.7 by 2012, and 68.7 by 2015: "The first wave of high-definition DVD homes will consist primarily of those homes with non-dedicated players, such as PS3, Xbox 360 and PCs.... We estimate the balance will shift in 2009 as dedicated player prices drop and the dust from the format war has settled." However, revenue growth in hard-copy software will be slowed by downloads, Kagan said, citing CinemaNow. Meanwhile, obstacles to the long-awaited combi player have continued to fall, most recently with NEC's announcement of a video processing chip that handles both formats at no extra cost. Ricoh had already announced a pickup lens that reads the disc at two depths, to accommodate the differing demands of each format. With NEC shipping the new part in 2007, we might see a combi by the end of that year. Maybe. But don't hold your breath waiting for a recorder.