For most people, today is New Year’s Eve. But more importantly, 20 years ago tomorrow the internet as we know it was born.

As you celebrate tonight, remember to offer one up for Vint Cerf and team for “jamming it down their throats”. Cheers! | Wired News story | Bob Braden on IETF General list

A company called Information Today (ITI) has picked up the ailing Streaming Media shows and publications from Penton Media, best known for the Internet World shows and publications.

The deal includes streamingmedia.com, a site whose Reader Deterrence Program was known for its never-ending popups and onerous registration requirements in the name of pumping readers into buying the reports and seeing the shows (which, even given the industry slump, were getting embarrassing).

ITI is quoted as saying its own Screaming Media shows will continue, leaving the fate of the Streaming Media shows up in the air. | Internet News.com story

RSS is a standard for syndicating content. If you’re not familiar with RSS, What is RSS? is a great new introductory article by Mark Pilgrim.

RSS is used mostly for articles on news and journal websites, but it’s not just for that. As Mark writes:

Of course, audio/visual digital media can be syndicated with RSS as well.

One kind of RSS-aware program you should have is an RSS news reader. These applications let you subscribe to lots of RSS feeds so that you can (for example) see at a glance whether there are new entries at a site, and then easily view those entries. They’ll change the way you use the web, I promise.

PlaybackTime has always used RSS. With smart news readers, you can just point them to PlaybackTime’s URL to subscribe. (You may have to point stupid news readers to the exact URL of PlaybackTime’s RSS feed.) On Mac OS, NetNewsWire is the obvious chock-full-of-Aqua-goodness choice (and NetNewsWire Lite is free). On Windows there are several choices (none which jump out at me as the overall best), including AmphetaDesk, FeedReader and Newz Crawler. | What is RSS? | Open Directory: RSS news readers

The Joint Video Team (JVT) — a cooperative effort of VCEG (the ITU’s Video Coding Experts Group) and MPEG (the ISO’s Moving Pictures Experts Group) — has completed the technical design of the MPEG-4 AVC video codec. Garry Sullivan, the chairman of JVT and VCEG, told News.com:

This is great news for MPEG-4. Now the AVC techinical design just needs to be formally ratified, which the JVT believes can happen by March 17. MPEG LA’s AVC “essential patents” submission deadline is currently January 31, but an insider tells me that this date may get pushed back again, and that could push back the ratififcation date as well.

Proactive software developers are working on their AVC implementations now. It’s especially important for the future success of QuickTime that Apple jump on the AVC bandwagon ASAP, since QuickTime 6’s MPEG-4 Video encoder is currently the most popular , but lowest-quality, MPEG-4 Video encoder out there. | News.com: Speedy net video codec done, but late

Sharp says that they’ll be selling 3D LCD displays in 2003. These displays will use a scaled-up version of the technology that is currently used in the J-SH07 cell phone that Sharp currently sells in Japan.

It will be interesting to see whether the limitations of this technology will affect its ability to escape “gimmick” status. For example, viewers’ eyes will have to be about 40 centimeters from the screen in order to avoid seeing overlapping images.

None of the streaming architectures currently support 3D video, but that’s an obvious To Do item. According to News.com, Microsoft is a founding member of the 3D Consortium (which is developing standards for hardware and software). Presumably, Apple will support any MPEG-4 standards for 3D video (which have been in the works for some time now).

However Sharp’s first-generation technology does in the marketplace, 3D displays are a sure thing. My hope is that by 2010, flat will be as quaint as mono and black and white. | News.com story

With this release, the Ogg Vorbis QuickTime codec is compatible with QuickTime 6. Ogg Vorbis for QuickTime is available for Macintosh and Windows. | QuickTime Components Project home

Walter Murch — the editor of movies including Apocalypse Now (for which he won an Oscar for Best Sound and a nomination for Picture Cutting), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient (for which he won Oscars for both Picture Editing and Best Sound) and The Talented Mr. Ripley — has switched to Final Cut Pro for his next film, Cold Mountain (which stars Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger).

Cold Mountain will be Final Cut Pro’s first major motion picture. Especially if successful, Cold Mountain could mean a huge sea change for the industry and for Apple’s — not to mention Avid’s — place in it.

Sorry…it’s just grown up so fast! Why, it seems like yesterday that I had a ringside seat to its birth as Apple’s QuickTime Evangelist, and then watched as Steve Jobs rescue what was then Macromedia’s Key after it was demonstrated during an otherwise-terrible Apple keynote at NAB. Some folks at Macromedia must be kicking themselves about now, but let’s face it — Key Grip would’ve been just another Windows non-linear editing tool under Macromedia’s care. | Hollywood Reporter story | IMDB: Walter Murch filmography (as editor)

The DVD Forum has chosen FireWire as their digital interconnect standard for DVD-Audio. Excellent! FireWire means one cable (rather than six) between your DVD-Audio-capable player and your preamp. Of course, you’ll need FireWire on both your player and preamp for this to work. | The Audio Revolution story

As a digital media thought-leader, you should be using XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS or at least planning to make the leap. (XHTML 1.1 is a “pain in the ass with no demonstrable benefit” for most users according to Mark Pilgrim, who knows this kind of thing.)

If the web is your business, now might be a good time to start getting familiar with XHTML 2.0. The third working draft of the XHTML 2.0 specification has been published by the W3C, and it’s clear that the specification is settling down and that this draft will resemble the final specification.

Where previous version of XHTML were basically cleaned up versions of HTML, XHTML 2.0 marks some interesting departures — forms are replaced by XForms, frames are replaced by XFrames, and events are replaced by XML Events. | XHTML 2.0 third working draft | Dive Into Mark: Changes in XHTML 2.0

A Carnegie Mellon University research group has developed a QuickTime-based, peer-to-peer streaming system called End System Multicast (ESM).

Traditional streaming is very expensive, because the broadcaster must have enough bandwidth to support the datarate of the bitstream multiplied by the number of viewers (plus some overhead). P2P streaming is important because the bandwidth burden is shared among the broadcaster and its viewers, and so it makes streaming broadcasts possible where it would’ve otherwise been cost-prohibitive.

ESM works by putting viewers into a distributed, self-organizing “tree” with the broadcaster as the roots. Viewers pass the content they receive to a small number of additional viewers, who then pass the content to a small number of additional viewers, and so on. ESM recently gained the ability to support NAT and firewalls, which means that most readers should be able to participate in upcoming broadcasts (see below).

Ironically, this QuickTime-based system currently works only for Windows and Linux viewers. | ESM home (with schedule) | ESM-related talks, papers and links