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- Optical Storage
With the world economy sliding into a depression, companies everywhere are facing difficult times. According to DigiTimes, Taiwan's optical disc manufacturers are being hit especially hard. Despite recent price hikes, CMC Magnetics and Ritek suffered net losses of NT$1.733 billion and NT$970.1 million, respectively, in the third quarter of 2008.
CMC Magnetics and Ritek, the top two Taiwan-based makers of blank optical discs, suffered net losses of NT$1.733 billion and NT$970.1 million, respectively, in the third quarter, according to their financial reports for the third quarter of 2008. However, CMC's third-quarter 2008 net loss shrank by 24.6% and Ritek's by 15.8% from the second quarter of 2008 mainly because the two companies increased their OEM prices for DVD+R/-R discs by about 10% in August, according to industry sources.
CMC and Ritek aren't the only disc makers losing money. Second-tier manufacturers Prodisc, Gigastorage and Princo also saw net losses per share for the first three quarters of this year.
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- Flash Memory
Transcend recently announced the release of its new 128GB high speed 2.5-inch Solid State Disk (SSD) drive. This MLC-equipped SSD features a new controller and SATA-II interface, making it capable of 145MB/s read and 92MB/s write speeds.
Transcend Information Inc. (Transcend®), the world’s leading manufacturer of memory products, is proud to release its all-new 128GB high speed 2.5-inch Solid State Disk (SSD). SSDs are made of reliable NAND flash memory that contains no moving parts, and therefore are not susceptible to mechanical failure resulting from vibration, shock or heat. Featuring a powerful new controller, Transcend’s MLC-equipped 128GB SSD far outpaces standard 2.5” hard drives, delivering exceptional sustained read/write speeds of up to 145MB / 92MB per second to guarantee fast throughput regardless of file size. With these high-speed transfer rates and virtually non-existent (0.2ms) latency, software applications and games open faster and run more smoothly, improving overall system responsiveness. Moreover, this SSD’s industry-standard SATA-II interface and 2.5” form factor allow easy and straightforward user installation in most notebook computers and mainstream PCs just like regular hard drives.
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Western Digital unveiled its new HD TV Media Player this morning. While lacking a built in hard drive, the WD TV HD Media Player lets users plug in up to two WD My Passport portable drives or other USB mass storage devices and play movies, photos and movies on their TV at resolutions up to 1080p.
WD® (NYSE: WDC), the world's leader in external storage solutions, today introduced a simple way for consumers to play their stored digital content on their HDTV in Full-HD 1080p resolution. The WD TV™ Media Player connects to a user's TV or home theater and plays digital movies, music and photos from WD's My Passport™ portable drive or other USB mass storage device. The WD TV Media Player is available now at WD's online store (www.shopwd.com) and select retailers.
According to research firm IDC, nearly 334 million GB of photos and more than 3.1 billion GB of video will be stored on consumer desktop and laptop computers in 2008. The research firm expects that to increase to 400 million GB and 5.8 billion GB, respectively, by 2010.
These large personal digital libraries are all but trapped on users' computers. In order to play their content on their TV, consumers have struggled with clumsy solutions such as copying onto multiple CDs and DVDs or connecting their PCs to their TV via wires or complicated home networking solutions. The WD TV HD Media Player enables consumers to easily and elegantly access their high-definition content on the biggest screen in the home.
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- Hard Disks
Seagate sent out a press release this morning, announcing its new 2.5-inch enterprise hard drive, the Savvio 15K.2. Available in 146GB and 73GB capacities, the Savvio 15K.2 features a 15,000-rpm rotation speed and an SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gb/s. Best of all, it uses 70% less power than competing 3.5-inch hard drives.
Seagate (Nasdaq: STX) today introduced the world's fastest and greenest drive -- the Savvio 15K.2 HDD, the new 15K-rpm addition to the Savvio family of 2.5-inch SAS 2.0 enterprise solutions. Savvio 15K.2 HDD delivers the industry's highest hard drive performance and reliability as well as adding a self-encrypting drive option, all while maintaining Seagate's industry leading, record low power consumption. The Savvio 15K.2 hard drive and the previously-announced Savvio 10K.3 hard drive are both part of Seagate's new Unified Storage architecture which converges disk drive interfaces, form factors, and security features into a common best-of-breed platform for powerful, yet simple storage solutions. Together, Seagate's Unified Storage architecture and the Savvio hard drive family improve manageability, integration, security and performance benefits for IT departments while ensuring business continuity with no compromise.
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CyberLink Corp. (5203.TW), an innovative solutions provider for the connected digital lifestyle, today launched CyberLink DVD Suite 7, a complete package of CyberLink's best multimedia software, and the only suite in its category to include playback features for enjoying Blu-ray Disc Disc movies on the PC.
DVD Suite 7 offers powerful but easy-to-use features, allowing playback of movies, media management, creation of videos and slideshows, burning and backup of data; just to name a few of the many multimedia functions that users can access via the versatile PowerStarter task integrator.
"DVD Suite 7 represents the ultimate collection of our leading software," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. "Not only do we provide Blu-ray playback, support for HD video capturing, editing, authoring, burning, and sharing, our online communities offer unlimited resources and new ways for customers to express their creativity. Add to that new media management tools for cataloging and sharing photos and videos, and you can say it really doesn’t get much better than this."
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Verbatim Europe recently announced its new external RAID hard drive. This two-disk solution offers both eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces and can be configured in RAID 1 (mirrored) mode for extra protection or RAID 0 to access its full 2TB of storage space.
Verbatim is expanding its range with an external RAID hard disk offering 2 terabytes of storage. The 3.5-inch HDD offers the maximum storage and the fastest data transfer rates in RAID level 0 and continuous data storage based on mirroring in RAID level 1. The Verbatim RAID 2TB eSATA & USB 2.0 Combo is now available in retail outlets.
The market for external hard disks is characterised by three main trends: ever greater storage capacities, faster transfer rates and higher data security. "With our new RAID HDD we are offering all this, as well as giving users the option of customised configuration," says Kai Miroschnik, Business Development Manager HDD Verbatim EUMEA.
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SlySoft has released a new version of its AnyDVD software. Along with the usual fixes and updates, AnyDVD (HD) 6.4.7.9 supports the latest version of the BD+ copy protection, removes region locks from menusand gives the option to disable BD-Live.
If you want to check out the latest version of AnyDVD, it can be downloaded from SlySoft's website.
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Pegasys, Inc. has announced the retail release of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress Video Encoder with NVIDIA CUDA technology. By incorporating CUDA technology, Pegasys has been able to offload the video decoding and filtering processes onto the GPU, increasing the performance of the software by as much as 446%.
Pegasys, Inc. announced today that the complete retail version of the new TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress Video Encoder with NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology is now available for purchase via www.tmpg-inc.com. The new NVIDIA CUDA technology offloads much of the processing required for TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress from the CPU to the graphics-processing unit (GPU). The software shows up to a 446% performance increase over the CPU-only version. System performance may vary with the user’s computing environment.
The future of video processing is here. Pegasys incorporated CUDA technology for filter processing into its popular video encoding software, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. Users can now tap into the graphics processing power that CUDA technology offers by offloading the video decoding and filtering processes onto the GPU to prevent the CPU from slowing down from too much data to quickly process. Pegasys is also working with NVIDIA to expand the GPU’s processing power to include encoding functions in the future.
NVIDIA’s CUDA technology is the world’s only C language environment for the GPU. It enables programmers and developers to create software for quickly solving complicated computation problems using GPU multicore parallel processing capabilities. The latest generation of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs offers up to 240 processor cores, compared to a maximum of the four cores found on high-end CPU’s. Any process that can be divided into multiple elements and run in parallel can be programmed to take advantage of the massive processing potential of the GPU.
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Patriot Memory, a global provider of premium quality memory module and flash memory solutions, today announced the release of their 64GB Xporter Magnum USB flash drive. The 64GB Xporter Magnum comes in an aluminum two-tone housing, boasts "210x" read speeds and is Microsoft® Certified for Windows Vista™ ReadyBoost™.
"We are excited to offer the fastest 64GB USB flash drive on the market," says Meng Jay, Flash Product Manager for Patriot Memory. "Patriot's 64GB Xporter Magnum's speed and capacity is perfect for consumers who need to transport and share large files. Having Microsoft's® certification, consumers are also assured of maximizing their Windows Vista™ experience."
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While Steve Jobs may consider Blu-ray to be "a bag of hurt," the folks at Psystar have already begun to ship OS X-compatible PCs with Blu-ray drives. The company announced this week that a Blu-ray writer is now available as a $350 option on its Open and OpenPro computers.
Psystar Corporation, the leading manufacturer of OS X-compatible PCs, is now shipping PCs with Blu-ray® optical disc drives and the nVidia® 9800GT graphics card. Psystar is shipping Blue-ray® and 9800GT equipped computers before Apple's release of these peripheral products on their own computers. Apple, developer of the OS X operating system, has chosen to delay support for Blu-ray® with Apple CEO Steve Jobs citing it as "a bag of hurt" during the recent release of the new Apple notebooks. Psystar president Rudy Pedraza countered:
"Blu-ray has already won the format war. Not only is there fully functional and mature support for Blu-ray in other operating systems but you can now rent Blu-ray discs from almost any rental chain. Blu-ray has become pervasive technology that is being widely adopted by consumers everywhere," says Pedraza.
Pedraza also pointed out that "Blu-ray is not just for movies. The ability to burn 25-gigabyte discs is a feature that can help users in media editing or enterprise environments keep archives of large file sets. Our systems, regardless of configured operating system, can now provide this functionality."
