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Sony Dvd Player Recorder Resources
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Latest Sony Dvd Player Recorder Information
Playing DVDs under GNU/Linux has not had the happiest of histories, what with the DeCSS debacle and subsequent legal battle. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that you will never be able to play your DVDs on your GNU/Linux system. Luckily, this is not the case, and there are several applications available for you to download and use. The issue with DeCSS is still with us but is slowly getting clearer. However, this has left some of the DVD players officially not supporting encrypted DVDs, although unofficially, playback is possible via third-party additions. Group of Chinese DVD player manufacturers have filed a class action against the western consortium, 3C DVD Patent Group, who own most of the patents related to the DVD technology. The Chinese manufacturers behind the case include Wuxi Multimedia and Orient Power (Wuxi) Digital Technology. Patent issues have been a hot topic during the last couple of years; the big fight was launched by Philips back in 2002 when it took the matters to courts in the U.S. and in the European Union, threatening to ban imports of unlicensed DVD players from China. Chinese manufacturers, such as Apex, had already managed to take lion's share of global DVD player markets, but refused to pay licensing fees for western patent owners that include Philips, Sony and Pioneer. The world's biggest retailer is offering a DVD player that slices out potentially offensive content from movies, such as nudity, violence and foul language. The device, available at Wal-Mart for about $70, merges video-editing technology developed by ClearPlay with an RCA brand DVD player. The DVD player works by cutting scenes or muting parts of the movie, according to guidelines from ClearPlay's staff of editors, said ClearPlay CEO Bill Aho. Well, assuming you already have a TV and assuming that you might like to be able to move your DVD player around with a minimum of trouble, Sony has an affordable portable DVD player that you might want to check out. The PSYC, as Sony calls it, is a DVD player that can also play audio CDs as well as CD-R/CD-RW discs that are loaded with MP3s. The PSYC weighs less than three pounds and is quite compact when compared to the traditional rectangular stereo component shape of most DVD players. The PSYC is even able to be color matched to your room: the player comes with a silver background from the factory, but there are three color panels that you can insert to change its looks. The holiday shopping guides were all atwitter over the new DVD formats, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD-competing systems for recording and playing back high-definition movies. Both feature hugely increased pixel counts, more bit-depth and a surfeit of storage. But here's an important question that goes unasked in all the hype: What features won't your next-generation DVD device have? Lindows.com, Inc. (www.lindows.com) today announced the release of Lindows DVD Player, a software application that joins a long line of Linux-based DVD player programs such as Xine, VideoLAN client, Mplayer, and Ogle. What makes the Lindows DVD player unique is its name and the fact that it costs money while the other applications don't. "In our continuing mission to give consumers choice, we're introducing this DVD player for Lindows," said Michael Robertson, Lindows CEO. "As I said, our goal is to give consumers choice, and that is what we have done." Your DVD might not be the first device that springs to mind as a channel for connecting your PC to your home entertainment system, but why not? DVD players can already handle some of the files stored on your PC: MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 movies and in many cases MP3s. And DVD players are already on good terms with your TV and your sound system. Add a PC card slot for wired or wireless networking; toss in support for WMA music, MPEG-4 video and JPEG still images; and you've got yourself a pretty good PC-to-entertainment-center bridge. Philips DVP642 DVD player brings MPEG4 to the masses. WHAT better way to contradict Bill Gates' gloomy predictions about the Death of the DVD than reviewing a very affordable DVD player. This one is able to play almost every file you throw at it, including MPEG1, MPEG2 (.MPG) and AVI video clips encoded in the popular MPEG4 format (with the proprietary codec DivX or the open source Xvid codec). You know, the kind of videos often posted on the web and shared on Peer-to-Peer networks (National Geographic kind of material, I'm told). The Phillips DVP642 quickly won a large following by its low price and hefty feature set, including component video output, NTSC and PAL selectable output signal, and the possibility of making it region free just by entering a sequence of commands on the remote. Oops, the MPAA tells me I was not supposed to say this. In 1999, a 16-year-old Norwegian high school student took on the motion-picture industry and won. The teenager, Jon Johansen, wrote software that decrypted the Content Scrambling System (CSS) that rearranges the bits on prerecorded DVDs to prevent the discs' being played back on unauthorized hardware. Until Johansen wrote his software utility, which he called DeCSS, you could copy the bits from a DVD to your computer hard drive, but because those bits were scrambled, you couldn't play a movie from those copied bits.
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