Seriously though, I can see this as being a good thing at the corporate level. The DiamonDisc is a standard capacity DVD that can be read with a normal drive. Where it gets interesting is that the disc is resistant to heat (up to 176 degrees), UV, and normal material degradation. No word on if it will survive being microwaved though.

Don’t expect the technology to be cheap though. The discs will cost you $35 each, but the price does go down for larger quantities. You have to send your information to Cranberry to be written to the disc, and then they ship the discs to you. It is possible to buy one of the special burners required to write to the discs yourself, but that drive will set you back a cool $4995.

[via Computerworld]

So why by all that’s holy, is “Transformers 2″ the best selling DVD/Blu-ray (in first week sales) of 2009? I think the issue is that this year has been somewhat dry as far as good movies go. “Transformers 2″ does appeal to a wider audience, and that’s why Paramount has sold 7.5 million copies in the first week that it’s been available. “Transformers 2″ did fall short of the 8.3 million discs sold in the first week by the original Transformers film.

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

Will it be the last? Probably not.

This one, however, costs a whopping $300 and features two hours of battery life for HDTV watching or 2.5 hours for DVD playback. You can also view pictures and video files using the built-in memory card reader.

The digital tuner supports broadcasts in 720p and you’ll have to bring along the included “sensitive external antenna” in order to reel them in.

The First Portable HDTV And DVD Player [Hammacher Schlemmer]

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.

The man, one Myles Weathers, was nabbed after surveillance footage found him taking DVDs from the little sleeves. Netflix itself had become suspicious when it received an unusually high number of complaints saying, “Hey, we never got our DVD~! What’s up?”

Yup, that’s because Mr. Weathers was stealing them all at a Massachusetts distribution facility.

In the chat room, Scott came up with an idea, if you were to do such a scam: instead of stealing the DVDs and never returning them, why not steal ‘em, rip ‘em, then send them on their way? What are the odds that someone is going to notice an extra day in mail delivery time?

One more notch in Netflix streaming’s belt, though.

$1 if you can figure out what DVD that is in the logo. (Note: Offer not valid on Planet Earth.)

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).

You get everything from seasons 1 through 6, plus Blue Harvest, Stewie Griffin — The Untold Story, and a bunch of extra behind-the-scenes stuff. Oh, and that giant Stewie head there. This box set is apparently exclusive to Amazon and oughta keep you occupied for most of a weekend.

Family Guy — The Total World Domination Collection [Amazon]

The most interesting model is the RD-X9 (pictured above), which not only boasts a 2TB HDD but also supports external HDDs (via USB) in case you have that many video files to handle. The usual DVD formats are supported, too. There is another USB port, which is reserved for USB keyboards, Toshiba says. The RD-X9 will be available in Japan starting next month (price: $1,300).

The RD-S1004K (see above) is one of two “standard” DVRs Toshiba unveiled today. It features a 1TB HDD and lets you store video on DVDs and an external USB HDD, too (price: $950). The RD-S304K features an HDD that stores just 320GB, but it also comes with a USB port, just in case. This model costs $750 and is pictured below.

Both the S1004K and the S304 are available in Japan from next month. Toshiba is yet to say if these DVRs will ever be sold outside this country, too.

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 [PDF alert!], 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?

I’d do a full-on rant, but this comment from Slashdot pretty much sums everything up:

And this assumes that in 1000 years there will be:

1. a player to play the damn thing
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
6. the cultural capacity to decode and understand what the hell they’re watching even if they do decide to watch it, assuming they have the ability to do so. For an extreme example, there is a non-zero probability that in 1000 years, the notion of “fiction” may well not exist, in which case an episode of “Friends” or “Seinfeld” become biographical portraits of stupid foolish people, as one needs to have the fictive distance to decode what is happening.
7. that anyone will give a rat’s ass about us in a 1000 years. They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age.
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD – just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.

I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time, those are just a few off the top of my head.

Frankly, I think we are the civilisation that in 1000 years will be a great and tantalizing mystery. Their world will be filled with our garbage, telling them how we lived (like wasteful pigs at the trough) but they won’t really know that much about what we think (because it was all digital and the technology disappeared in the die-off).

RS

And there you have it. My personal favorite is number seven, that Future People will give a rat’s ass about what we burned onto DVD in the year 2009. You can never judge a culture based entirely on its frivolities—Future People won’t necessarily condemn us for having more votes in American Idol than in a presidential election, though they’d have every right to—but there’s really not too much going on right now that would warrant 1,000 year long appreciation. Perhaps if scientists cured a pesky disease, but that’s about all I can think of.

Will the iPhone be a big deal in the year 3009? (Will it be a big in the year 2010? Who knows.) Will Future People be impressed that your Chevy Cruze got a whopping 30 miles to the gallon? (Will Future People even know what a “gallon” is?) Will Twitter be seen as Man’s Salvation and the “pulse of the planet”? (Will Future People even speak English, or Spanish, or German, or Japanese, to be able to read your Tweets?)

That’s provided we don’t all kill each other by then.

One model features a 320GB HDD (RD-E304K), while the other boasts a 1TB hard disk (RD-E1004K/pictured above). Both recorders feature a super-slim body (253mm) and come with one HDMI and one LAN port.

The recorders will be available in Japan at the beginning of next month and prices are pretty decent: $500 for the 320GB model and $650 for the 1GB model. But Toshiba hasn’t said yet if these recorders will be sold outside Japan as well.

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.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is less than thrilled about the prospect of a machine thats sole defense against the copying of rented or borrowed movies is a nag screen that advises the owner to only copy legally-owned DVDs.

Aside from copying rented or borrowed DVDs, the MPAA asserts that consumers shouldn’t even be able to make a digital copy of a DVD they legally own in the first place, insisting that an additional fee must be paid for a hard drive-based copy of the content found on a physical disc.

The case is currently in US District Court, where RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser gave over four hours of testimony yesterday with more to go today. According to CNET:

Real began work on Facet with the hope of building the next-generation DVD player, Glaser told before U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel. Glaser argued that consumers are clamoring for a better way to manage their DVD collections and that Facet and similar products, such as DVD players from Kaleidescape, do exactly that. In addition to building its own box, Real could conceivably generate income by licensing Facet’s software to consumer electronic makers.

The major film studios perhaps view Facet as a device that could do to DVDs what the iPod did to recorded music. Facet owners could rent or borrow films and then copy and store them without ever having to pay a cent. It’s been widely reported that most of the music on iPods was ripped from CDs or illegally downloaded.

The studios maintain that consumers don’t have the right to copy films they already own, according to statements made by MPAA lawyers during the hearing, which started Friday and will continue Wednesday. Hollywood contends that if, for example, consumers want to download a copy of a movie they already own, then they must pay additional fees for the digital version…

…During Glaser’s demonstration of Facet, he showed how the box made the process of scanning, selecting, and pulling up digital DVD copies as simple as managing an iTunes music library.

In addition, the box could instantly provide a synopsis about a film or the movie’s cover art, as well as enable a user who interrupts the playback for whatever reason to instantly return to the spot where it left off. Glaser used a copy of a box set from the show “The Sopranos” to demonstrate how a Facet owner could begin playing any episode within the set almost instantly.

Copied DVDs would only be playable on the particular box to which they were copied in order to prevent illegal sharing. There’s also the question of how the technology handles bypassing CSS encryption. The company behind the $10,000 Kaleidescape system won a legal battle in a similar lawsuit brought about by the DVD Copy Control Association, which handles CSS encryption technology, and RealNetworks’ defense team alluded to the rather large selection of software-based DVD ripping programs currently available on the market.

Whatever the outcome of the current case, though, will consumers really go for a $300 set top box that rips DVDs when there are already plenty of streaming and OnDemand options available for much cheaper? People with disc-destroying toddlers and/or large DVD collections who don’t like swapping discs in and out of their DVD players all the time might go for something like Facet, but will there be enough of them to make the entire project worthwhile?

[via CNET]

The Kids in the Hall Megaset [Amazon.com via dealspl.us]

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!

The piracy uses are obvious, but can you imagine if, say, the Hollywood studios developed an application like this? I’m not saying they should change their entire business model to support this basic concept—tagging real-world DVDs for download—but what a progressive idea it’d be. You’re standing in Best Buy or Wal-Mart or whatever, shopping for a new digital camera, when you see This Great Movie staring at you. Too bad they want $20 at retail! Why, you could scan the movie using your phone, and it’ll automatically set it to download from a Hollywood-approved Web site or service, for less than you’d pay at retail. Again, the underlying idea here is what’s most interesting, something to show that Hollywood is thinking “outside the box,” as it were, not the specifically detailed implementation; that can be worked out at a later date.

So yeah, the application can be found on the Android Market for $2.99. If I had a G1—I use a BlackBerry right now—I’d probably be all over this. You should be, too.

via Wired’s Threat Level

With the massive onslaught of downloadable and/or streaming content from service providers like Netflix, Vudu and Hulu; Hollywood studios are hurting for revenue from DVD sales, but Warner Bros may have an ace in the hole. They’re now offering the WB archive of over 6800 films for a new “made-to-order” service. To date, WB has only released 1200 of those films since entering the DVD business in 1997. You can order DVDs for $19.95 plus shipping or download titles directly to your computer.

Warner Archive via Reuters

Still, the business model is sound. Redbox claims to have 20% of the DVD rental market in some of its oldest territories, and customer satisfaction is extremely high. Redbox does one thing, and does it very, very well.

Via Zatz Not Funny.

Denon is citing production problems for the delay. No word on consequences for other markets yet, but I doubt Americans will get the player in February as promised.

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.

The DV4S is geared towards the AV crowd with DivX HD video support. The DV4M is marketed towards the CD collector with the ability to convert CDs to MP3s for local or USB storage. No word on price or availability but eventually, you should see these players on retailers shelves and comment how sexy they are but yet, still opt for the more traditional player instead. That is, unless, you’re loft is styled after Moby.

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.

The BD-P1 has HDMI 1.3, Ethernet, DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD and the standard assortment of outputs. The MSRP is set at $199 but you and I both know that a sale sticker will be slapped on the box as soon as it hits US retailers – hopefully.

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.

Should Real win the lawsuit—it’s prepared to alter the software in order to placate the judge and/or MPAA—it will resume sales, which have been frozen since October.

You will recall that Real thinks it should be allowed to sell RealDVD because it doesn’t destroy a DVD’s CSS encryption. The studios don’t give a hoot; all they see is, “Oh man, J6P will be able to copy DVDs now.” Hence lawsuit, freaking, etc. It’s very tiring, really.

No, this story has nothing to do with Homer; it just makes me laugh.

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.

The first title will only be released in Nippon and is called Code Blue, a TV series aimed at Japanese teenagers that was aired earlier this year on TV over here. Users can watch the series on a standard DVD player and flip it to get to see the content in full Blu-ray glory. Code Blue is released on 4 hybrid discs (price: $400 for 534 minutes of content) or 7 conventional DVDs ($260).

Infinity Storage Media says they are also about to roll out an advanced version of the disc that integrates a dual-layer Blu-ray (50GB) and a single-layer DVD (4.7 GB).

Ideally, this would allow the driver to view travel information while the passenger watches a movie. Or vice versa if you know where you’re going and love getting in accidents. This will reportedly be available on all S-Class models starting summer of 2009.

[via Benz Insider]

Blu-ray is now officially more popular than plain ol’ DVD in Japan. Wait, let me rephrase that: there are now more Blu-ray disc recorders in Japan than there are DVD recorders. More than 50 percent of disc recorders in Japan are now of the Blu-ray variety.

The distinction is important. It’s not that Blu-ray disc sales have overtaken their DVD counterpart, but that people there are now buying more Blu-ray recorders than DVD recorder. Considering I don’t know anyone who bought a DVD recorder to begin with—DVR and TiVo rule the day—I’d say this info isn’t nearly as important as, say, the Blu-ray Disc Association would have you believe.

Again, for the 80 billionth time, Blu-ray has hell of a fight on its hands, despite the fact that HD DVD has been dead for nearly a year. There’s the perception that DVDs look and sound “good enough,” the fact that Blu-ray discs don’t offer the same practical improvement that DVDs did over VHS (no more rewinding, chapter selection, commentaries, fun but useless extras, etc.) and that Blu-ray discs are still regularly $10-$15 more expensive than their DVD counterpart. In this economy, folks are looking to save as much money as they can, and who could blame them?

via GamesIndustry.biz