Congratulation to BitTorrent - they have managed to develop a business model around BitTorrent P2P technology which until now has been almost synonymous to Internet piracy. They have today launched a commercial video download store, which offers movies and TV-series and is backed by major movie studios. At launch they have more than 3000 titles from Warner Brothers, Paramount, MTV, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate and so on. Pricing seems somewhat fair, being $2.99-$3.99 per movie, but it comes with nasty restrictions - movies can only be stored for 30 days and Windows Media Player is required for playback. D’oh!

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The developer Hank315 has today released a significant update to the famous HC Encoder. HC is a very high quality freeware MPEG-2 encoder that can challenge any commercial alternative in terms of speed and quality. Use it with DVD ReBuilder to make amazing quality DVD backups! The new version comes with support for HD resolutions up to 1920×1152, updated GUI, speed improvements for SSE2 compatible processors and a few other improvements.

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Got confused by the title? Well don’t be, as while the 3X DVD is an idiotic name for this format, the idea is very cool and has plenty of uses. The 3X DVD is a new hybrid format by the HD-DVD camp, that brings the benefits of high definition video on the affordable DVD format. The trick is to use max resolution of 720p (instead of 1080p), and utilize the VC-1 or AVC video compression codec for higher compression ratio to fit the content on a normal DVD disc. If you do the math of resolution, bitrate and a more efficient codec, the end result should look pretty good. And the size of the movie would be reduced from 25G to 9G maximum, which of course would be much better for the Internet…

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SlySoft, Inc. is a company based in Antigua and famous for their AnyDVD software that bypasses the copy protection techniques used on DVDs. Due to their offshore location they have been able to offer these products commercially on the Internet. Today they have made a very bold move to announce a HD-DVD edition of AnyDVD, which is able to bypass the AACS copy protection used on HD-DVD movie titles. Never before there has been commercially produced solution for circumventing a new generation of copy protections and media so quickly after the new format has been launched. This development really questions the usefulness of copy protection schemes in general - what is a restriction for others, is a business for some.

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Traxdata, a leading brand of flash and optical media storage products, has today announced the availability of its first Blu-ray rewritable (BD-RE) Disc. The single layer disc can store a huge 25GB of any form of digital data including photos, music, computer games, video or documents, enabling users to easily store and categorise all their data.

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Our friends at the CDR-Zone.com have continued their series of very thorough and professional DVD recordable media reviews. This time they got their hands on some Maxell 16x speed DVD+R media, which is made by Ricoh (MID: RICOHJPN R03-04). Based on their conclusions, these Maxells seem to be pretty good, while being cheaper the Ricoh branded media.

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Pioneer is expanding their famous DVD recorder product line with two new models, DVR-112 and DVR-112D. Like in the previous models, the 112 and 112D models are identical, but the D-model lacks DVD-RAM format support. Recording speeds are impressive on all formats, and boast a market leading 12X speed for the DVD-RAM format (DVR-112). We here at BitBurners have been using Pioneer recorders in our test lab for a couple of years, and can’t wait to get our hands on this new one. Especially the previous DVR-111 has proven to be a very good recorder and we expect the 112 to continue this trend.

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“Super Multi Blue” Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD Player Offers Solution to Next-Generation Disc Format War? LG has confirmed that U.S. consumers can now purchase the first dual- format high-definition (HD) disc player at U.S. retailers. The LG BH100 outputs 24- and 30-frame-per-second 1080p signals, supports various A/V formats, including MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264 video, MPEG1/2 audio, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital+, DTS and DTS-HD audio.

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It’s a good day to buy high quality SlySoft DVD software products. Once again they are celebrating the birthday of their CEO, Giancarlo Bettini, and giving awat $5 to $20 discounts of all purchases from their discounts. Just type coupon code ‘Giancarlo’ when purchasing, and you can get CloneDVD or any other of their fine product for a reduced price. Offer is valid only to 6th of February

Get it now!

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You may have noticed that BitBurners’ news have been slow for this week. The reason for this is that we have been working hard on the Alpha 2 version of our new MediaBase, the DVD recordable media quality database. Bugs have been fixed, features improved and new media added to the database. The MediaBase serves two purposes: it is the online storage for your DVD media quality scans and it provides interesting quality statistics about the recordable media on the market. Never buy a bad disc again!

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