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DivX, Inc. , a digital media company, and Film Fresh Inc. today announced that Film Fresh is the first U.S. download-to-own (DTO) online store to provide major motion picture titles from Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Warner Bros. Digital Distribution in the high-quality secure DivX® format. With this new service available at www.FilmFresh.com, full-length Hollywood movies can be conveniently downloaded and played on the millions of DivX devices that have shipped into the market, including DVD players, digital TVs, gaming consoles, Blu-ray disc players, and portable DVD players. Consumers have the freedom to transfer their DivX movies via DVDs, USB drives, SD memory cards, and portable hard drives, or streamed over a home network for playback on other registered DivX Certified devices they own--all on supported products from top consumer electronics brands such as LG, Philips and Toshiba.
Film Fresh is an online film destination offering a one-stop shop for movie lovers of all types and ages at www.FilmFresh.com. In addition to Film Fresh's large catalog of Hollywood movies and films from around the world available on DVD and via download, the site offers daily commentary on new films, and extensive opportunities for audiences to communicate using the latest social networking applications.
Titles available for download at Film Fresh will include the latest weekly Hollywood releases; recent popular films such as Pineapple Express, 17 Again, 3:10 to Yuma, Hancock and Watchmen; arthouse titles like The Lives of Others, Religulous and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; contemporary horror films such as My Bloody Valentine and the Saw franchise; classics like Glengarry Glen Ross, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Reservoir Dogs; popular franchises like Spider-Man, Harry Potter, The Matrix and Batman; plus a variety of films for children, including Stuart Little. The catalog of Film Fresh Hollywood titles in the DivX format is expected to grow quickly as new releases from all four studios become available for digital distribution.
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- Flash Memory
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, power supplies, and solid state drives, today unveiled the OCZ Agility EX Series which makes SLC (single-level cell) NAND-based storage truly affordable in a solid state drive for the first time. The Agility EX provides the best of both worlds —the performance and advantages of SLC NAND technology at an incredible value. Based on the quality Indilinx controller, the Agility EX Series delivers an enhanced computing experience with faster application loading, snappier data access, shorter boot-ups, and longer battery life.
“Though SLC has traditionally been more expensive than MLC flash there are both performance and lifespan advantages to SLC based solid state drives, it is for consumers that require the extended reliability of single level cell flash that we are now introducing the Agility EX series of SSDs,” commented Eugene Chang, VP of Product Management at the OCZ technology Group. “The Agility EX offers consumers the most cost effective SLC solid state storage solution on the market, and when customers take all the benefits of SLC into consideration the total cost of ownership of these drives truly shines through.”
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- Optical Storage
Addonics Technologies today announced the Pocket Blu-ray/DVDRW and the Pocket DVD-RRW drive. They are believed to be the first portable optical drives with built-in eSATA and USB interface.
The Pocket Blu-ray/DVDRW is a portable Blu-ray player, DVD player and burner that comes with the extremely fast eSATA and the ubiquitous USB 2.0 interface. With the Blu-ray player, you can turn a notebook or desktop computer into a high definition cinema and enjoy the high definition video quality and the dynamic sound effects of Blu-ray. The Pocket Blu-ray/DVDRW supports practically all types of DVD or CD content from Blu-ray discs to regular DVDs and CDs in various file formats. It is also a high speed DVD+/-RRW and CDRW burner.
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Despite a rapid rise in the sales of consumer Blu-ray players, a fall in their prices and an increase in the number of high-definition movie titles, Blu-ray Drives (BDs) in PC systems have been left singing the blues, according to iSuppli Corp. By 2013, BDs will be found in only 16.3 percent of PCs shipped, up from 3.6 percent in 2009.
“BDs won’t be replacing DVDs as the primary optical drive in PC systems through at least the year 2013,” said Michael Yang, senior analyst for storage and mobile memory at iSuppli. “They eventually will find success, but during the next five years, that success will be limited in the PC segment. According to Yang, the two main reasons hampering the adoption of Blu-ray drives in PCs include costs as well as the lack of a library of movies that justifies the need for consumers to move to a different drive in their PCs.
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- Flash Memory
Apacer Technology Inc., the leading memory manufacturer, releases the latest super-speed A7 Turbo SSD with 128MB cache memory and a multi-channel synchronous transfer mode. With a sequential read/write speed of 230/200 MB/sec, A7 Turbo SSD 128/256 GB effortlessly breaks through the speed bottleneck of conventional drives and exceeds the amazing 1500X performance. Moreover, the ultra low 0.26W average power consumption ensures longer battery life for the laptop while operating in full speed.
“For those power users who pursue the maximum computing performance, conventional drives are always a bottleneck due to innate limitations,” an executive of Apacer said. “The random read/write performance of A7 Turbo SSD is 5 to 6 times higher than conventional 5400rpm drives. You will have an entirely different experience of extreme speed no matter you’re doing professional works or playing games.”
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- Flash Memory
BlockMaster, a leading provider of secure removable data devices, today launches SafeStick SuperSonic, which is 5x faster than any other device in the market, enabling users to transfer files and information securely in just a few seconds. SafeStick SuperSonic was put through its paces at the Ferrari Maserati Racing Day in Sweden on August 22nd, where BlockMaster zoomed around the track at speeds of up to 200 mph in the Maserati MC12. SuperSonic was tagged on the fastest supercars in the world to mark the release of BlockMaster's technological invention, which takes USB speeds to the max and AES256 hardware encryption further than it has ever gone before.
SafeStick SuperSonic revs up to 23Mbyte/s for write and 33Mbyte/s for read, providing lightning speed transfer of files. This move is designed to support the huge growth in rich media files, such as images and videos, being transferred onto USB flash drives for business use. It only takes between nine and 30 seconds to load, jetting ahead of competitive devices, which take up to a minute to load every time they are plugged in.
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Elecom Japan sent out a press release today, announcing its new ESD-IDSAA series of solid state drives. What makes this "nanoSSD" unique is that instead of taking up a drive bay, it plugs directly into one of the SATA ports on your motherboard. Elecom's new drive also gets its power directly from the SATA port. However, an auxiliary power cable is included in case it cannot get enough juice. The ESD-IDSAA series is available in 8GB (ESD-ID008SAA) and 16GB (ESD-ID016SAA) capacities and is capable of 75MB/s read and 30MB/s write speeds. No word on pricing or availability at this time.
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Roxio®, a division of Sonic Solutions® today launched Roxio Creator® 2010, a comprehensive upgrade focused on streamlining and accelerating the process of capturing, editing and enjoying personal video, including high-definition content. Building on Creator’s already extensive feature set for editing and sharing digital video, Roxio Creator 2010 now offers automatic smart encoding to dramatically decrease rendering times while maintaining optimum video quality, and leverages ATI Stream and NVIDIA® CUDA™ technologies to make project encoding up to five times faster. Creator 2010 also adds a range of Blu-ray Disc™ (BD) features including AVCHD Archiving, BD-RE on-disc editing, and complements its comprehensive Blu-ray Disc authoring capabilities with a new array of high-definition motion menus.
Roxio Creator 2010 also makes it easier to enjoy video on a range of mobile devices with a newly simplified and reorganized output display that enables users to quickly transfer videos that are automatically optimized for the display characteristics and playback features of their particular device. Adding to Creator 2010’s versatile video capabilities is a Web video capture feature that allows consumers to grab streaming video, such as user-generated content on YouTube®, for viewing offline on portable devices and DVD players.
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In 2009, Blu-ray title prices have declined rapidly and the pricing gap is narrowing, according to Futuresource Consulting’s price tracking service. The service shows that in February the average Blu-ray price for new release movies in the UK was £27.29. By the beginning of August this had dropped to £16.74 – a sizeable decline of 40%.
Catalogue pricing has also fallen, but not by such a significant amount. From an average price of £16.87 in February, this dropped to £14.25 in August; representing a decline of 15%. When looking at the average catalogue price across the three largest etailers, (Amazon, Play and HMV), the price drop is far more significant, with the average catalogue price hitting £11.22.
Back in Q4 2008, both in the USA and the UK the premium for purchasing a new release title on Blu-ray compared to DVD was between 30% and 80%. However, for catalogue BD titles this premium was considerably higher, and in some instances was as much as 300%. Although it has never been disputed that consumers will pay more for Blu-ray, the premium in the market in 2008 was clearly not sustainable.
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NEC Electronics today announced the availability of a new image-processing solution, the EMMA3TMSL/P system-on-chip (SoC) based on NEC Electronics' enhanced multimedia architecture (EMMA) platform. EMMA3SL/P SoC is a set-top box (STB) device compliant with H.264 high definition (HD), the next-generation image-compression standard, as well as the multi-format video support used for the increasing number of worldwide internet-protocol television (IP TV) STBs, such as DivX®, VC-1, and WMV. The new SoC is also the first among the company's EMMA products to support China's audio/video standard (AVS).
The EMMA3SL/P device is an image-processing SoC that integrates key functions needed to receive and decode digital broadcasts, including MPEG-2 HD audio/video decoders, transport-stream demultiplexers, as well as display controllers for enhanced display and graphics features.
