|
Latest
"pacific dvd player"
Information
As PC and consumer electronics vendors work to move digital media off your PC and into your living room, they're calling on a familiar favorite to lead the way: the DVD player. DVD players and recorders have a great advantage over many other approaches to creating a digital home: They are well-established living room products that connect to a TV, the traditional centerpiece of a home entertainment system. 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. Where's My (Bleeping) Sex? Who wants a DVD player that automatically deletes all the juicy bits of movies? One guess. Companies that will, without anyone asking them to, protect us from media evildoers and exposed flesh and scary exploding things and that part in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" wherein the universe is blessed, for the briefest of moments, with the joy of Kate Winslet's radiant nipples. The holidays have come to an end. It seems like just yesterday thanks were being given, wrapping paper was being torn to pieces and you were nursing that New Year's hangover. Through it all, you've probably snapped dozens, hundreds-maybe thousands-of digital pictures. Now you've got a hard drive full of snapshots, all dressed up with no place to go. Some of your family and friends have dial-up accounts, so you can't send a slew of pictures that way, and you can't expect them all to come to your house to view the pictures. Heck, maybe some of them don't even own a computer. What to do? Why not create a disc that will play in a DVD player, with your images as a slideshow and maybe some nice holiday background music? With a CD burner, you can create a VCD-a CD which will play in most newer DVD players. (Our DVD player is at least four years old, and it plays VCDs). 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. Another year of the Consumer Electronics Show unveils a new crop of portable DVD players with interesting features. Swivel screens, wireless headphones and tablet designs are just a few of the new portable DVD player ideas coming in 2005. Portable DVD players are hot items for those who want to take their DVDs with them on the road. Many manufacturers have put out portable DVD players which offer lots of cool features. 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? Hidden features included in a DVD player released in January have the Motion Picture Association of America contemplating legal action. Thanks to Nerdout.com, both users and the MPAA are aware that the Apex AD-600A player's DVD copyright protection scheme and regional encoding features can be overridden. Developed in China by Visual Disc and Digital Video Corp. (VDDV) and sold in the United States by Apex Digital Inc, the Apex player is attracting attention for reasons besides its low price of US$169.95. 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. 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.
|
