The manufacturer Pioneer has confirmed that its upcoming 16-layer Blu-ray discs will play back on most current standalone Blu-ray players including the Sony PlayStation 3.
The discs boast an impressive 400GB capacity and are finally headed into production by 2010 after being introduced earlier this year by Pioneer.
Current Blu-ray discs consist of either single layer 25GB discs or 50GB dual-layer discs.
The company also added that it will begin manufacturing 40-layer 1TB discs in 2013.
Result for: 5g
Teosto (Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society) has officially requested that USB drives and mobile phones with MP3 playback function should join the products — such as DVDs and DVRs — with a recording/storage device royalty fee. Teosto has been fighting for the right to add the fees to mobile phones for two years now and now they want both external hard drives and thumb drives included as well. The proposal will now travel to Ministry of Education where the final decision is made.
Teosto has claimed that extensive amounts of copyrighted recordings are copied to both USB drives and mobile phones each year and therefore the composers have a right for a proper compensation. The fees would increase mobile phone prices up to 12,60 euros (approx. $16) for music phones such as the Nokia’s new touch-screen XpressMusic 5800 and presumably Apple iPhone.
Last year the same happened to HD DVD and Blu-ray discs that carry nowadays a fee of up to 1,89 euros per disc.
The proposed royalties for the year 2009 are as follows.
Mobile phones with MP3 playback:
1,4 euros for up to 512MB of internal memory
2,45 euros more than 512MB but up to 1GB of internal memory
3,45 euros more than 1GB but up to 20GB of internal memory
4,15 euros more than 20GB internal memory
Mobile phones that are advertised as music phones (eg. Nokia XpressMusic series, Sony Ericsson Walkman series):
2,4 euros for up to 512MB of internal memory
7,35 euros more than 512MB but up to 1GB of internal memory
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Result for: 5g
Plextor made a surprising announcement today when it introduced two dual-format HD optical drives, the B920SA and B300SA, both of which can read Blu-ray and HD DVD discs.
Although the HD DVD format is now obsolete, the new drives gives owners a chance to watch their HD DVD titles on a computer while also allowing them to make way for Blu-ray.
The B920SA can burn 25GB BD discs at up to 4X speed and can write CDs and DVDs at 16x. The B300SA cannot write Blu-ray discs but can read at a relatively fast 6X speed. Both drives connect through Serial ATA and will ship in March for $450 USD and $600 USD respectively. Each drive comes bundled with movie playback, burning, and editing software for Windows systems.
