The Financial Times reports that a deal has been struck between Apple and 20th Century Fox that will let iTunes users rent the latest Fox DVD releases for a limited time, ready for viewing on an iPod or iPhone, or their computers, and likely on Apple TV.

This marks the first time FairPlay, which is Apple’s version of Digital Rights Management currently used on iTunes-bought tracks, to be used on non-Apple products. Apple is also currently in talks with Sony, Paramount and Warner Bros for a similar deal.

The agreement between Apple and 20th Century Fox is expected to be announced at Macworld on January 14, but it isn’t yet known if the deals with Sony, Paramount and Warner will be closed in time to be announced on the same date.

Long ago, to remove Digital Rights Management from my music tracks, I started with the rigamarole of burning them to a CD from iTunes then re-ripping them back to iTunes, fresh, sparkling clean and DRM-free.

After I had a accumulated a small stack of CDs I never used from this method, I thought of just reusing a CDRW, erasing and burning over and over, even if I just had one track to clean - I didn’t have to wait to fill up a CDR with DRMed songs just to save a little money.

5thirtyone.com shows us an even easier way that doesn’t involve burning digital media at all, and is so simple I smacked myself on the head and said, dang, why didn’t I think of that?

One caveat - you’d need to have iMovie HD on your system.

The basic idea, in a nutshell, is for your to import the DRMed track into iMovie as a soundtrack, export it to iTunes as AIFF, then convert it to AAC within iTunes then just manually adding back the meta data and artwork. A little tedious, but no more ripping and burning to CD. And easier, as 5thirtyone.com points out, to create an Automator sequence to do this by the numbers every time you need to strip DRM from a track.

More detailed instructions and explanations from 5thirtyone.

From the Yeah-I-Knew-This-Was-Going-To-Happen Department:

Apple’s just dropped the cost of DRM-free, 256kbps AAC tracks from the iTunes Store from US$1.29 to the usual US$.99 per track, making the high-quality iTunes Plus tracks the same price as the regular stuff while “offering audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings” and free from oppressive digital rights management to boot. (They used to charge a thirty-cent upgrade fee to bump up previously-bought tracks to iTunes Plus level.)

In addition to the EMI catalog of these songs, Apple has added (among other labels) Sub Pop, Nettwerk, Beggars Group, IODA, The Orchard and more. Now at over 2 million tracks, this makes the iTunes Store the largest DRM-Free high-quality online music source thus far.

Hopefully someday soon, it’ll all be like this. And even cheaper.

The new iPod Classics sport a ton of storage - 160 gigs to be exact; about 40,000 songs, give or take a few grand. For a few people, that still might not be enough.

Here’s the solution: ShrinkMyTunes.

This new commercial app compresses your songs even further, often twice as much, with no appreciable loss in quality - so you can squeeze off roughly a third of a terabyte from an iPod classic, and listen to 80,000 songs. That’s roughly 7.5 months of continuous listening with no repeats, if my math is correct.

It’s relatively tiny - a 2mb app, and has no frills to speak of: only two settings are available - Better Compression, and Better Quality. It uses a NASA-designed algorithm (”content sensitive heuristic optimization algorithm”) that trims off excess and redundant sound, and adjusts sound quality downward so that it compresses better, without unduly compromising the music. If you can live with it, it’ll at least double your storage. This’ll be great for the legions of 8gb and 4gb iPhone users, shufflers and for the coming horde of 8gb and 16gb iPod Touch users.

It works for most MP3 players, not just the iPods, and maintains all the tags and info after conversion, which averages about 30 seconds per song. You get 2x compression in most cases, 4x in others, like audiobooks and spoken word files. There are gotchas, though: only works for MP3 and WAV files, is audio-only, and worst, it’s for Windows only for now. AAC and Mac support coming within the year, don’t worry.

US$39.95. Here.

There is life outside the iPhone.

There’s the iTunes Store.

iTunes is now selling select whole albums from indie bands at much lower rates of US$5.99 and US$6.99 in the Next Big Thing section. Some of them are even DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks. (Clicking on this link will open up your iTunes app and take you online to the Store’s NBT page.)

In the spirit of democratizing music and allowing access to excellent indie bands and giving these bands a crack at getting somewhere, Apple’s move is commendable. That said, when the heck are you opening up the store to our region of the world? *grumble*