In things that I NEVER expected to read this morning, this would probably have been top on the list if I was given a choice. Yes you read the title properly, The Walt Disney Company is buying Marvel Entertainment.

BURBANK, Calif. & NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Building on its strategy of delivering quality branded content to people around the world, The Walt Disney Company (DIS) has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment, Inc. (MVL) in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced today.
Under the terms of the agreement and based on the closing price of Disney on August 28, 2009, Marvel shareholders would receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own. At closing, the amount of cash and stock will be adjusted if necessary so that the total value of the Disney stock issued as merger consideration based on its trading value at that time is not less than 40% of the total merger consideration.

Based on the closing price of Disney stock on Friday, August 28, the transaction value is $50 per Marvel share or approximately $4 billion.

“This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories,” said Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company. “Ike Perlmutter and his team have done an impressive job of nurturing these properties and have created significant value. We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney.”

“We believe that adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation,” Iger said.

“Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses,” said Ike Perlmutter, Marvel’s Chief Executive Officer. “This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.”

Under the deal, Disney will acquire ownership of Marvel including its more than 5,000 Marvel characters. Mr. Perlmutter will oversee the Marvel properties, and will work directly with Disney’s global lines of business to build and further integrate Marvel’s properties.

The Boards of Directors of Disney and Marvel have each approved the transaction, which is subject to clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, certain non-United States merger control regulations, effectiveness of a registration statement with respect to Disney shares issued in the transaction and other customary closing conditions. The agreement will require the approval of Marvel shareholders. Marvel was advised on the transaction by BofA Merrill Lynch.

Finally Windows users have a way to work with iPhone videos. For those who don’t know, the iPhone 3GS is actually a capable video recorder. It records to 640×480 at 30 frames per second and with an empty 32GB iPhone you can easily record a few hours to the thing. The problem has been there was no simple way in Windows to edit the videos or send them to DVD. Sure you could download various shareware or freeware apps, or buy one of a dozen video editors, but this seems like such a pain when on a Mac you can just use the built in iMovie app to edit and publish.

Enter the newest version of Windows Live Movie Maker. When run on a Windows 7 machine, the newest version of Microsoft’s video editor supports additionally AVCHD, MPEG-4, and most importantly for iPhone users, Quicktime formats. I almost did a double take, but sure enough.. I drag my iPhone movies into a new project and they show up perfectly on the timeline. Unfortunately this still leaves XP and Vista users without an easy solution for the time being, but hopefully come October and those numbers will begin to dwindle rapidly.

One of the beautiful things about Windows 7 is not only the system’s native ability to playback AAC files, but its ability to natively read the MPEG-4 tag data in the files as well. Mind you I still use iTunes exclusively as my jukebox, but when/if I need to do actual file level work on my music, being able to sort it in Explorer by artist, album, song, etc in libraries in Windows 7 makes it much nicer to work with. When it works.

MP3 Data Not Showing Up

Check that your ID3 version is v2.3 or lower. For some odd reason Windows 7 still can’t handle ID3 v2.4. In iTunes you can show the “Kind” column and sort on it to quickly list all of your MP3s, select them all, and then right click on the and select “Convert ID3 Tags…”. Don’t worry, iTunes does the conversion non-destructively so it keeps all of your tag data intact.

AAC Album Art Not Showing Up

If you are having a problem seeing your album art in Windows 7’s Explorer and you use iTunes, you might be having the same problem I did. It appears that if I right click a bunch of songs and say “Get Album Art” iTunes will download the art but not actually put it in the file. I am guessing it keeps it on the disc and then just references it in iTunes. Regardless, what I did to fix it is to use iTunes’ downloading feature, then do the following:

1. If Album Art isn’t already visible, click the fourth button from the left on the lower left corner of the screen.
2. Make sure the “Selected Item” is showing artwork in the bar. If it says “Now Playing” click the arrow to the left of it to change it to “Selected Item”.
3. Select the songs you want to download art for, right click and choose “Get Album Artwork”.
4. Now here’s the trick to get the art working in windows. Doing this an album at a time, highlight all of the songs in the album, right click on the artwork in the lower left window, and select copy. With the songs still highlighted right click on the songs and choose “Clear Downloaded Artwork”. Finally right click back in the artwork window (where it should now say “Drag Artwork Here”) and choose paste.

Doing this I have had a 100% success rate in my album art showing up properly in Windows 7’s Explorer window including (and especially) in libraries and Windows Media Player. Even better, the album artwork now shows up properly in my DLNA players including my PS3.