Just when you thought you had to upgrade to all that ‘fan-dangled hi def malarkey’, Toshiba have come out with an HDD recorder, the RD-X7, that can write hi def video to an old-fashioned DVD disk. Obviously there are capacity issues with DVD disks being slightly smaller than their big brother HD DVD disks, but the boffins at Toshiba have found a way around that too. Toshiba have used their unimaginatively entitled ‘HD Rec technology’ to squeeze all the zeroes and ones required for two hours of HD action onto the 4 GB or so offered by the DVD disk. Hurrah!

Oh yeah, what about the recorder itself, well there’s very little spec out there on the sucker apart from the usual support for 1080p/24. So whilst actual details are a bit sketchy the concept sounds good.

There’s bound to be a few gotchas around this new tech from the boys at Tosh, one of which is that we assume a HD enabled DVD disk won’t give you the full blown HD experience when played back on a common garden DVD player, you’ll actually need a DVD player that can spurt out the hi def output in the first place. So it may not be the ideal solution that it sounds like but hey its another option for the hi def consumer and options are good!

By the way heard the rumour that 8-track is the new CD ;)

Source: engadget

Featured tags: dvd media hdd recorder hd dvd toshiba

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In what would be quite an about face on the copying of movie media, the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) Licensing Administrator has put forward an agreement to companies using AACS that consumers would be allowed to make a number of copies of their HD DVD or Blu ray movies. The agreement defines the term ‘managed copy’ where by companies using AACS could add an extra charge to the cost of their product iof the consumer wished to be able to make copies.

As Michael Ayers, a representative of an industry group that licenses the AACS, points out

It remains a possibility that consumers, if given the chance to make three copies of “Spider-man 2” could give those copies to their neighbors, which technically would qualify as low-volume piracy.

So we shall wait and see how the companies using AACS (inclduing movie makers) respond. Hopefully it will be positively, as I believe this is a decent compromise between the two parties, especially between movie makers and movie viewers.

Featured tags: AACS blu ray hd dvd

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It’s been an interesting 48 hours for the guys at Digg. Having taken a decision to remove a post displaying the hexadecimal code which breaks the protection on HD-DVDs, the site was inundated with posts re-displaying the keys. At one stage the whole front page of the site contained posts with the keys either in the title or description. Digg temporarily closed the site down and then released this statement via their blog.

After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

They unblocked all posts regarding the HD DVD keys and within a few hours the site appeared to be back to normal with only a few posts about the keys showing on the home page.

What a fiasco, Digg not knowing what to do and Digg users screaming ‘free speech’. The Digg Terms of Use clearly state

Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all.

so the guys were quite within their rights to remove the posts if they so desired.

But what about free speech or more correctly ‘Freedom of Speech’. The term is generally used when a government censors a citizen or citizens from expressing their views no matter what the views are. To apply it to a website removing user content seems extreme in my opinion. Digg own, manage and run the site, they should be ‘free’ to display whatever they want on their site. They should listen to what their visitors want on the site, but it’s still their call.

Probably the most ironic thing all about the whole fiasco is that the keys are easily available on the net and have been for a while. Perhaps it was all just a big scam by Digg ….

Featured tags: digg freedom of speech hd dvd hexadecimal code

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