News written by Petteri Pyyny (November, 2005)

Sony Pictures made an interesting statement on this week when they decided that they will use 11-years-old MPEG-2 on upcoming Blu-ray movie discs. Decision is slightly weird, since Blu-ray players will also support more modern video encoding mechanisms, such as Microsoft's VC-1 and MPEG-4 AVC.

By using either AVC or VC-1, Sony could have achieved even better picture quality for the movies that will use 1080i video resolution (1920x1080 as opposed to 720x480 on standard American DVDs). However, Sony claims that with Blu-ray's increased storage capacity (minimum of 25 gigabytes versus maximum of 8.5 gigabytes on DVDs), even MPEG-2 provides "good enough" picture quality when compared to DVDs. But, when considering mathematically the situation, their claim doesn't hold water -- HD-quality video, using 1920x1080 resolution has exactly six times more pixels than NTSC DVD-Video has, but Blu-ray's storage space is only about three times larger than dual layer DVD's storage space. Thus, the bitrate per pixel will be lower, if comparing side-by-side a DVD packed 100 percent full of video and Blu-ray full of HD-quality video. Sure, the better resolution most likely makes up the difference more than enough, but still the decision is rather unexpected.

Maxell, a storage subsdiary of Hitachi, announced on Monday that it will launch first line of holographic storage products in September, 2006. The holographic disc's physical will be the size of a normal CD and it will have storage space of 300GB when launched in September.

Holographic discs have been gaining some momentum lately, with an alliance of technology companies announcing their plans in February this year to develop a unified holographic format, dubbed as HVD. But despite plans, companies haven't so far announced any detailed plans to roll out the products using the technology, so Maxell's move might open the game for "next, next generation DVD replacements".

Holographic discs are different from DVDs, CDs and upcoming blue-laser products, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, as the other formats only use the surface of the CD -sized disc, whereas holographic discs use the entire disc volume for storage. Data is stored on a holopgrahic disc by using light-sensitive crystals.

Music industry's global lobby organization IFPI ("the mother of all RIAAs..") announced today that they are preparing to launch a massive lawsuit wave against P2P users in Europe, Asia and South America. South America is being targeted for the first time in record labels' jihad that has lasted for years now.

According to IFPI, file-sharers in Sweden, Argentina, Hong Kong, Singapore and Switzerland are among those being sued. The total number of lawsuits set to be launched this time is more than 2,100.

IFPI said that the legal actions have been targeted so far mostly towards young men between 20 and 30 years of age. The latest wave of lawsuits brings the total number of P2P users sued outside United States to 3,800 and includes P2P users in 16 countries.

Legal actions against P2P users today include 15 cases in Sweden, 22 in Hong Kong, 33 in Singapore and 10 in Argentina.

Source: Reuters via Yahoo!

Our content writer Dela has added two new guides to our guide section.

The first guide is for using TSUNAMI MPEG DVD Author Pro (a product from the same guys who've made the super popular TMPGEnc MPEG-1/2 encoder) and can be found from here:

https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/tsunami_mpeg_dvd_author_pro_guide.cfm

The other guide is for converting DVD movies to Nero Digital format. That guide is located here:

https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/convert_dvd_movie_to_nero_digital.cfm

Finnish mobile phone giant, Nokia, released yesterday their digital TV (using DVB-H standard) -equipped phone, Nokia N92.

The phone is set to launch in second quarter of 2006 and uses, like other N-series phones do, Symbian S60 as its operating system. Nokia has been running DVB-H trials across Europe, most notably in Finland and UK and at least in Finland, the response from test group has been positive about the uses for TV-equipped phone.

The 3G TV phone also includes WLAN support, web browser and all the usual stuff you'd expect to find from a high-end Nokia phone nowadays. The screen of the device is 2.8-inch and uses 16M colors and has resolution of 320x240 (same as in VCD movies..).

According to Nokia, the phone will cost approximately 600 euros (excluding the hefty discounts operators give for new users with long contracts).

Source: Nokia press release

Our sister site, MP3Lizard.com served its 2,500,000th MP3 download last night, marking yet another milestone in our long history of providing a way for independent artists to publish their music online.

MP3Lizard.com currently hosts almost 9,000 tracks from 2,300 bands, making the site one of the biggest destinations for people searching for legal, free music. All tracks available on MP3Lizard.com can be downloaded for free, although they can't be redistributed or used commercially without copyright owner's permission.

If you haven't visited MP3Lizard before, maybe its time to see whether the "next big thing" can be found from our vast collection of indie artists :-)