Tag: DVD

Just when we think we've heard about the dumbest criminal on this planet, another story breaks and leaves our mouths agape. With this latest one, we almost don't know where to start. Let's preface it with this: If you're going to scam a celebrity, you better bring your A-game. Unfortunately, a group of UK-based, bungling criminals didn't even bring their D-game. According to The Sun, British ...

Engineers at North Carolina State University have created a computer chip that holds one terabyte -- or 1,000 gigabytes -- of data and is no larger than a fingernail. For perspective, that means you could store 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text on this tiny chip. According to Computer World, this modern marvel is made possible by a process called selective doping, in which ...

Known for his anti-piracy views, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has once again been accused of being the pot that called the kettle black. According to Huffington Post, a French newspaper is reporting that Sarkozy illegally made 400 copies of a DVD and gave them to diplomats at a conference. The film in question is a 52-minute documentary on Sarkozy, himself, called 'A visage decouvert: Nicolas ...

A former government employee amassed quite a collection of DVDs over the years, but there's one problem. They were all stolen property. Myles Weathers, who worked at a postal sorting facility in Springfield, Massachusetts, plead guilty Tuesday to federal theft charges. According to The Smoking Gun, Weathers swiped 3,012 Netflix DVDs, worth about $36,471, during his tenure as a postal worker. ...

To the easily flustered: avert your eyes. Swedish director Mia Engberg has produced 12 short films that she dubs, as oxymoronic as it sounds, 'feminist porn,' the AFP reports. Artsy, with slow close-ups of men and women, lots of laughter and 'unsexy' imagery like hugging, 'Dirty Diaries' -- as the series is called -- hopes to celebrate sexuality, not please men. Enterprising, and not without ...

As a motley group of music snobs, avid gamers, and movie buffs, we hate to admit this. Really, we do. But the vast majority of our listening, playing, and viewing takes place not in an acoustically treated home-entertainment fortress, but on a couch in front of a laptop. Seeing as that's the case, we really don't need all those fragile, easily smudged discs lying around as we once did. And even ...

Handbrake What it does: Handbrake converts DVDs and other videos into formats for easy sharing between your computers or loading onto a portable device or console. What we like about it: Handbrake is dead simple to use, with one-click presets that format for the iPod, the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple TV, PSP, PS3, and Xbox 360. But power users can access advanced controls to fine-tune ...

The most powerful weapon to have recently emerged against the high-tech, big-money industry of DVD piracy comes in an unlikely package: knee-high, four-legged, and covered with black hair. Wednesday, according to the AFP, the worldwide arm of the Motion Picture Association of America (called, simply, the Motion Picture Association) announced that 35,000 pirated discs had recently been located in ...

This morning, the National Consumers League released a statement claiming that 90-percent of PC-owning, U.S. consumers want the ability to save DVDs, as they would CDs, on their computers. The study was conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation, and drawn from a survey of 1,000 consumers of varying ages. This should come as no surprise to those who have witnessed the gradual digitalization ...

Being the digital aficionados that we are, we still prefer Criterion's Online Cinematheque over this approach, but those not quite ready to give up physical media will absolutely (and understandably) disagree. At any rate, the studio has just fired up its Warner Archive, a nice little web portal where film fanatics can surf over and locate niche titles to be placed on a DVD and shipped out. Most ...

The book and music retailer Borders may soon be removing CDs and DVDs from its stores' shelves, according to a report in the Consumerist. Apparently, this past Monday, a Borders employee wrote the Consumerist, claiming that "most Borders [stores]" will remove 75-percent of their CD and DVD inventory over the next couple of months. According to this tipster, whose veracity has not been ...

Back in September, we said it was only a matter of time before the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) went after RealDVD, the software that lets you copy entire DVDs onto your computer for personal use. Studios are currently involved in a heated lawsuit with RealNetworks in Federal court that aims to ban the sale of the product. The MPAA claims that the software violates the Digital ...

In the VHS days, rental versions of movies were usually saddled with preview after preview that you'd have to fast-forward through before getting to the main event -- a small penalty for not having to pay full-price to watch it. With the advent of the DVD, and now high-def Blu-ray discs, you're usually just a button-press away from the film itself. Increasingly, however, the real attraction of ...

For the first time in the history of our majestic Earth, video games have seen retail sales higher than those of DVD and Blu-ray, according to GamesIndustry.com. The popular Nintendo Wii was a major factor, along with what we can only describe as folks' desire to escape from what had been a pretty tough year. Media Control GfK International reported that video game sales jumped 20 percent last ...

A trivia point for you: What was the last big studio movie to be released on VHS tape? The answer is 'A History of Violence,' released in 2006. People in the consumer electronics industry have been announcing the end of the VHS era for years now – but this time they really, really mean it. Ever since the introduction of the DVD back in the late '90s, the VHS tape has been only the ...