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"personal dvd player"
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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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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