New kid on the block Cranberry claims that their new DVD will last 1,000 years. Of course no one will be around to dispute that claim, and by then we’ll be using some kind of organic memory light data cell, but hey! Who knows, maybe future generations will want to see those vacation photos you took of Grandma Rhoda and Aunt Suzy.

This is just wrong. I’ll admit, I didn’t enjoy “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”. I thought the plot was weak and contrived, and I was slightly offended by the dumbing down of the film (robot urination and racial stereotypes? give me a break). I realize that the original “Transformers” wasn’t exactly the height of cinematic art, but it was better then the sequel.

If you long for the ability to watch high definition TV on a seven-inch screen that’s resolution is a mere 480×234 but you also want to have the option to watch standard definition DVD’s as well, then here’s your next purchase.

According to Hammacher Schlemmer, this is “The First Portable HDTV And DVD Player.”

Some Netflix news for you this morning. It looks like a 49-year-old post office worker is facing a maximum of five years in federal prison after having plead guilty to federal theft charges. What was he stealing? Oh, you know, some 3,000 Netflix DVDs over the years.

Amazon’s lopped over $60 off the 22-disc “Total World Domination Collection” of Family Guy episodes, bringing the total price to just $75 (good today only).

Toshiba, the company behind the now dead HD DVD format, first talked about joining the Blu-ray bandwagon back in June, but it seems there’s no hurry. The company announced a total of three new Vardia DVRs today [JP], and they all use DVDs and HDDs to store data.

A Utah company claims to have developed a DVD that will last 1,000 years under normal, everyday conditions. (You don’t have to be a professional archivist, in other words.) And while that’s an impressive achievement, if it is indeed true, there’s one small problem: what are the odds that, 1,000 years from now, Future People will derive any value at all from said discs?

After losing the format war against Sony, Toshiba is yet to produce Blu-ray hardware, but at least they keep on rolling out DVD hardware in their VARDIA series. The company yesterday announced two new HDD/DVD recorders for the Japanese market [JP].

RealNetworks is currently entangled in a legal case over a prototype hardware DVD ripper called “Facet.” Described as “TiVo for DVDs,” the $300 box aims to replace set-top DVD players by allowing owners to rip their movie collections directly to a 500GB hard drive for quick and easy access and playback.

This is tremendous. It’s an application for Android called BarTor that you use to automatically download movies using BitTorrent. You simply hold the G1’s camera to a movie’s barcode, presumably while at Best Buy or something, then the software sends the movie title to your computer, which you’ve already set up to run uTorrent or Vuze. And off it goes!

Redbox, the wonderful dollar-a-day DVD rental kiosk company, is currently owned by a number of parties, including Coinstar and GetAMovie, a subsidiary of McDonalds. Coinstar, Redbox’s majority owner, announced last week that they’ll be buying up the remaining shares. No price changes are planned for normal DVDs. Although we previously reported that Redbox would rent Blu-Ray discs for $1, indications now are that Blu-Ray rentals will cost a little more.

Denon announced the DVD-A1UDCI, a universal player that supports Blu-ray discs, SACDs, CDs, DVD-Audio and DVD-Video, back in December for the Japanese market. The company today announced [JP] it will release the player, which was scheduled for release in Nippon this month, in March 2009.

Samsung dropped the swanky BD-P4600 Blu-ray player at CES and now it has some company – and competition – from LG. While the DV4S and DV4M are not Blu-ray players like the Samsung counterpart, the two models still hold their own with different functions and features.

DVD wasn’t a success until that first Christmas when players were available for less than $40 and Blu-ray’s success probably weighs on a similar price barrier. Chinese manufacturers are certainly here to help and prices are slowly dropping to the Wal-Mart-acceptable level with the AMEX Digital BD-P1 as the latest no-name player that might be headed to the retailer. On paper, it doesn’t look terrible.

Remember RealDVD, Real Networks’ attempt to legitimize DVD copying, only the movie studios freaked out because they didn’t understand what the software was all about? Well, Real still thinks it has a good chance of winning the lawsuit it faces. Lawsuit out of the way, it’ll go on selling RealDVD like nothing ever happened.

Tokyo-based Infinity Storage Media [JP] is the world’s first company that will roll out a Blu-ray / DVD hybrid disc (a boxed set, to be more precise) , which has a single-layer of Blu-ray (25GB) on one and a conventional dual-layer DVD (8.5GB) on the other side.