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weird combo of the day
Posts Tagged “
DVD
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weird combo of the day
adwatch
ThunderCats Were Loose On Palace of Westminster
When most DVDs are released, production studios put up some posters and run a few television spots. However, when ThunderCats Season 2 hits store shelves...lets just say Lion-O isn't settling for an afternoon at Kinko's. Instead, he boldly emblazons the ThunderCats signal onto London's Houses of Parliament. While some surely see the stunt as a subversion to a great tradition of government, others will realize that during the global fight against terror, nothing instills fear into our enemies like occasional real world manifestations of 1980s cartoon superheroes. [shinyshiny]
nintendo
Dusty Wii Syndrome Returns With Launch of Mario Kart
They say smoking and squalor can kill a human, but that's turning out to be equally true for the Nintendo Wii. The hardware's disc-reading laser seems incapable of cutting through the grit, grime and second-hand smoke that accumulates on its lens' glassy veneer. The issue first appeared with Super Smash Bros. Brawl double-layer DVD, and now reports about the launch of Mario Kart Wii this month in Japan show that game is no different. Nintendo will clean your Wii for free, but that will mean a week or so without it. [GameFront via GoNintendo]
portable dvd
Philips DCP951 Portable DVD Player Likes iPod Touch, Kitchen Counters
The Philips DCP951 portable DVD player ditches the laptop design of previous portables for a shiny tablet layout that works as well on the road as it does in the kitchen. As the successor to the DCP850, this portable has a half-inch bigger LCD screen and a dock for the iPod Touch. Price and info are below the jump. More »
netflix
Netflix Doling Out 5 Percent Credit for Massive Monday Outage
If your popcorn got cold waiting for No Country for Old Men from Netflix thanks to that 11-hour flame-out on Monday, they're going to give you a nice little five percent credit to make up for it. [Hacking Netflix]
review
The Gadget: Oppo's follow-up to the fantastic DV-981HD up-converting DVD player with 1080p and Anchor Bay's VRS video tech (AutoCue, Precision Video Scaling, Progressive Cadence Detection and Precision Deinterlacing) and 7.1 audio with Dolby Digital Surround EX, DTS Digital Surround, Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro-Logic II.
More »
Lightning Review: Oppo DV-983H 1080p Up-Converting DVD Player
The Gadget: Oppo's follow-up to the fantastic DV-981HD up-converting DVD player with 1080p and Anchor Bay's VRS video tech (AutoCue, Precision Video Scaling, Progressive Cadence Detection and Precision Deinterlacing) and 7.1 audio with Dolby Digital Surround EX, DTS Digital Surround, Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro-Logic II.
More »
home entertainment
Lionsgate: Free iPod/iTunes Ready Digital Copies With Select DVD and Blu-ray Titles
Lionsgate is in the midst of working out an agreement with Apple that will make it the latest movie studio to offer iTunes digital copies on select DVD and Blu-ray titles. In order to get a piece of the action you will have to redeem the copies using a code that will come packaged with the title. Then it is just a simple matter of plugging the code into iTunes and downloading. The first movies up for grabs with this addition are Rambo and The Eye, both of which will be released around the summer. Stallone and Alba kicking things off. Man, I can't wait. [Canadian Press and PC World]
storage
Samsung Unleashes 22X DVD Burner, Smallest 500GB HDD
Samsung's Spinpoint M6 is the world's first 2.5-inch, 500GB HDD. Standing in at 9.5mm tall, the M6 will easily fit most existing laptop hard drive bays. For those of you worried about sloth-like performance, the Spinpoint M6 has a 5400rpm spindle speed, an 8MB cache, as well as a 3.0Gbps SATA interface. A Free-Fall Sensor can be added as an optional extra. Not content with breaking the world record for the HDD with the smallest size/biggest capacity, Samsung is also introducing the industry's fastest DVD burner.More »
blu-ray
Netflix Quadrupling Blu-ray Selection, Possibly Increasing Prices
Good news for Blu-ray-adopting Netflix subscribers: the movies-by-mail service is quadrupling its Blu-ray library, increasing the number of titles from 400 to 1,500. Bad news for Netflix subscribers: this'll probably jack up the price. More »
dvd
Surreal DVD Subtitles Turn The Queen into Flight of the Conchords
A screening of The Queen for the hard of hearing turned into a farce after the movie was captioned with some of the most surreal subtitles ever seen. Viewers at the event, organised by Ryde Council in Australia, heard Prince Philip, the monarch's husband, claim that "people removed their heads" as he drove past and, my personal favorite, that "every newspaper proprietor has blown in his hands today." Now, while you may think that the British press is run by necrophilia-obsessed onanists, the script said something else: More »
blu-ray
Blu-ray Player Sales Up 600 Per Cent, According to UK Online Retailer
Stuart Rowe, COO of play.com is claiming that sales of Blu-ray players have increased seven-fold since Toshiba announced it was cutting and running from its HD-DVD format. The UK-based web retailer sold more Blu-ray players on Tuesday than it has in the whole of last week, and was the first to react to the Toshiba news by slashing HD-DVD player prices. More »
dvd
DVD Takes Bullet for Fire Chief in Fast-Food Shoot-Out
A loose DVD in a pocket saved a South Carolina man from injury after he unwittingly got involved in a firearm fracas outside a fast-food joint. Fire chief Barry McRoy was leaving the Waffle House restaurant at the weekend in the town of Walterboro when he got involved in a gun battle between two men. More »
streaming movies
Netflix Movie Streaming Coming to Xbox 360 and PS3?
Although surveys can pretty much ask anything (would you like to see George Wendt eating beans in a movie?), this survey from Netflix that asks whether you'd like to stream Netflix movies to your Xbox 360 seems pretty plausible to us. Here's why. More »
blu-ray
Sony Confuses My Mom
...and she has a PhD. Here's the adorable email I had waiting in my inbox this morning.
Subject: blu-rayMy response, after a brief chuckle: More »
So, Mark, this would replace a dvd...so I would need a new player? I had heard about it at best buy yesterday and did not understand. Are there blue ray tvs? or is that a whole other thing? Mom
format wars
Netflix Goes Blu-ray
Netflix has just announced that they will exclusively purchase Blu-ray DVDs instead of HD DVDs for their hi def rental option. While the company had formerly supported both formats, their stock of HD DVDs will be phased out completely by the end of this year. Netflix clearly agrees with everyone else that HD DVD is dead, and disco is happy to finally have some company. [reuters]
format wars
HD DVD Losing Its Arsenal in Japan
The HD DVD troopers are surely fighting the losing battle, as new research from Japan details a surge in Blu-Ray recorder ownership. The study surveyed buying trends from 2,300 electronic stores across Japan, and the statistics showed that next-generation DVD-unit sales rocketed from 6.1% in October to 20% in November and December. As the next-generation recorders have a higher price point, they managed to account for some 35% of the total DVD player market value. However, Blu-Ray walked home with the largest market share of the two. More »
apple
iTunes 7.6 at Macworld: Movie Rentals and Digital Copies on Fox DVDs
MacRumors has a screenshot from a Family Guy DVD slated to drop on Jan. 15 that includes a digital copy for iTunes and iPod, seemingly confirming what we heard earlier. But, the "Fox Digital Copy" (which apparently is in WMV and H.264) requires iTunes 7.6, which AppleInsider says will debut at Macworld (obvs) and include movie rental support. [MacRumors, Apple Insider]
samsung
Samsung Soundbar X810 Self-Contained Speaker System Also Contains DVD Player
The Pitch: Samsung's 5.8GHz wireless Soundbar HT-X810, an all-in-one single wall-mountable speaker unit that contains a DVD player and looks like something Batman would use in his Batcave Bat-hroom. It also has a subwoofer, DVD player and Bluetooth connectivity for streaming audio.
The Catch: The DVD player upscales to 1080p, has HDMI out and can handle DivX as well as DVD Audio—this isn't a low end unit for lousy home theaters.
