Pioneer BDC-202 is an interesting combo drive that brings you the features of a Blu-ray BD-ROM drive and a DVD recorder. As such it is an interesting choice for any home computer, but especially for HTPCs due to the Blu-ray playback features. We have just started testing the drive, and as usual our primary interest is on the DVD recording quality. The drive uses a “three-way compatible” optical pickup unit, which means that a single optical unit is handling all the disc formats. As such the recording speed is a bit slower than the fastest DVD recorders on the market, but the 12x speed should be quite sufficient for everyone unless you are planning on using the drive for DVD-R mass production. We have just started testing the drive and so we decided to publish the first results right away, even thought the testing work is far from completed, since this is a drive that has a lot of consumer interest currently.

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Marble Maze for Nokia N95, N95 8GB and N82 by Cahoona Games

Marble Maze is a labyrinth game that utilizes the orientation sensor built inside some Nokia mobile phones (like Nokia N95, N95 8GB, and N82). In the game you control a ball inside a labyrinth by tilting the device in your hands. Currently there are 40 different labyrinths to solve, and 3 different balls, a metal ball, a rubber ball, and a super pingpong ball. In the game you object is to Read more »

The new tsMuxeR version 1.84 introduces support for .SRT subtitle format. In our previous guides we have shown you how to author Blu-ray/AVCHD discs from .MKV files using tsMuxeR. This guide is an extension to our previous guide, covering the new subtitle features of the tsMuxeR. By using this guide you can convert compliant high definition .MKV (Matroska) source files to the AVCHD format, with subtitles but without the lengthy process of re-encoding the file.

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PerfectRip guarantees optimal full or partial content extraction by making proper use of the C2 pointer technology inside your optical drive. You can be sure images and tracks are free from errors, or use an error report at post-processing stage to mute, hold or average (linear interpolation) corrupt samples.

PerfectRip generates disc images fully compatible with SlySoft CloneCD and Golden Hawk Technology CDRWin, and extracts tracks in PCM, WAV, WAV+G and 2448 formats. PerfectRip is compatible with 100b (Plextor) subcode reading, this makes use of Reed-Solomon EDC/ECC so your R-W subchannels are always free from random errors.

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HC Encoder is a freeware high quality MPEG-1/2 encoder.

Changes from version v0.22

• Added adaptive quantization
• Added panscan

Author: hank315
License: Freeware, donations accepted

Usually when we review drives we focus mainly on the recording quality, and media quality scans. However in the case of Pioneer DVR-215 it quickly became obvious that it wasn’t the most interesting way to go, as it seems to deliver identical results in terms of recording quality than the recently reviewed Pioneer DVR-115D. This being the case, we decided to take a different angle to this “review” and study the impact of the different connection methods of these two drives. Consumers today have one more selection to make when they are purchasing DVD recordable drives: Whether to choose a SATA (Serial ATA) or a PATA (Parallel ATA) connected drive. Even thought the benefits gained by using a SATA connection seem quite obvious and significant, there is more than one side to this story.

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