After bringing us the TV for Skype Anywhere product we were kinda hoping for something equally unusual from Novac’s next consumer offering. Unfortunately, all we’re getting this time around is the NV-HV355 Mobile Video HDD media player in need of a 3.5-inch IDE disk. Once you sort that out, stuff the disk via USB 2.0 [...]

Korean consumer electronics firm Samsung has introduced a new 32GB flash memory card, which can be doubled to 64GB and provide storage capacity for up to 40 movies or 16,000 songs in portable media players, cell phones and other devices. Samsung did not provide release date details for the new flash memory technology. Yesterday, Apple [...]

First, there was the war between eight-track tapes and cassettes. Then there was Betamax versus VHS. Now a new battle for the future of home entertainment is once again forcing consumers to choose. High-definition DVDs are supposed to provide sharp, wide-screen images to fill the more than 30 million HD television sets that have been [...]

TEAC’s new boombox features an FM/AM tuner, an LP player, and a CD recorder. It allows you to actually rip from the LP deck to a CD directly. It’ll play 33 1/3, 45, and 78′s of course. It can also remember the locations of up to 32 tracks. Stereo speakers are built in, along with [...]

Toshiba in collaboration with Memory Tech Japan have succesfully combined a HD-DVD and DVD to a single 3 layer twin format disk. The resulting disc conforms to DVD standards and can be played on DVD players as well as standard HD-DVD player too with a firmware upgrade. The resulting DVD disc will have Single Layer [...]

Sony will release the “BNR50A” dual-layer BD-R media on September 15. The media is expected to cost in Japan 4,500 Yen ($39). The new discs offer a capacity of 50GB. They can be recorded at 2x speed and they are made according to the Version 1.1 specifications released by the Blu-ray Disc Association. Sony’s “AccuCORE” [...]

The first sign of compromise between the two disc formats, Pioneer’s new drive will burn and read both Blu-Ray & HD-DVD. The two opposing optical media formats have always been at opposite ends of the spectrum, with one camp supporting their format and not the other. Pioneer has crossed that picket line and will be [...]

Good news for those for movie makers on the go – Toshiba has announced what it claims is the industry’s first commercially available high-capacity SDHC memory card. Regardless of who is first, Toshiba’s cards will hit the market in November, initially as a 4GB card, but follwed by 8GB and 16GB SDHC cards in 2007. [...]

Hollywood movie studios will soon allow downloaded movies to be burned to DVD, following changes made to the encryption technology used to protect DVD movies from piracy. The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), an industry group that devised the Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption that protects DVDs from unauthorized copying, said that movies will [...]

It’s sometimes hard to illustrate a jump in technology, but TDK has made it that bit easier, unveiling a disc for Blu-ray drives with a whopping 200GB capacity. TDK’s new 200GB Blue-Laser disc doubles the capacity of their existing 100GB Blu-ray prototype and could store approximately 18 hours of high definition video (encoded at 24Mbps). [...]

According to Cnet Aus, Sony BWU-100A won’t playback commercial Blu-ray movies, but only home made discs. According to Mr. Vincent Bautista, Sony’s product manager for data storage, there are two major points why Sony’s Blu-ray won’t support commercial movies: a) Copy protection issues b) Lagging software development , but only user-recorded high-definition content from a [...]

According to Cnet, the movie industry has plans to relax controls over how films are copied to DVDs. Digital movies, which are offered by such companies as CinemaNow and Movielink, have so far failed to catch on with the public. One of the big complaints from consumers has been that downloaded movies are prevented from [...]

AMEX DIGITAL of Hong Kong claims that it will be the the first company that ship a Blu-ray disc recorder to the European market, with availability starting on August 28th. The AMEX DIGITAL Blu-ray disc recorder (M505-BDR) is a complete Media Center PC with an Intel 945P Express chipset, an Intel Core-2 Duo CPU, ATI-X1600 [...]

Sony Electronics has begun U.S. shipments of 50GB dual layer Blu-ray Disc™ recordable (write-once) media with AccuCORE™ technology. The company also confirmed that it plans to start shipping 50GB dual layer rewritable BD media later this year. The capacity represents more than four hours of HD quality video, at a 24 Mbps transfer rate, allowing [...]

Desktop hard drives holding 1 terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of storage will likely be announced in 2006, said Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. These drives, which will have a 3.5-inch diameter, are expected to be incorporated into PCs and home servers. Healy wouldn_t say what [...]