Gearfuse

With Blu-ray players being so expensive nowadays, either creator Rog8811 went dumpster diving for parts or just has enough money to smash open a Playstation 3. Whatever the reason, he managed to cram a working blue-laser diode inside a Zippo lighter. The best part? It actually works. Windproof? No problem bro, ’cause this fucker is made of light.

If you want to build your own, there are instructions. You’ll need to procure your own blue laser diode somehow – godspeed with that.

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It seems like only yesterday I was paying $20 dollars for every hot movie that hit store shelves in VHS format. Today, I can go into a store and buy three tapes for just a dollar. Whoever said that a dollar can’t buy you anything was full of shit. Ever since the creation of DVD, VHS has been on a steady decline. Now with the last major VHS supplier calling it quits, the final nail in the coffin of VHS has arrived.

“It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt,” Distribution Video Audio co-owner Ryan Kugler told the L.A. Times. “I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in the warehouse we’ll just give away or throw away.”

Distribution Video Audio is now in the business of selling discount DVD displays for big-box retailers and its co-owner warns that in three or four years DVD will face the same fate as VHS. Looking to buy a movie for someone? Consider Blu-ray.

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Disney isn’t the only one releasing Blu-ray movies with BD-Live, a feature that enables you access content via the Internet. Warner Home Video has announced its first BD-Live enabled Blu-ray film will be The Dark Knight.

Some of the features included with the movie are My WB Commentary, which allows users to record their own commentary on the movie and overlay in picture-in-picture style on the film as it plays. Additionally, The Dark Knight will feature BD-Live community to allow fans to schedule screenings with friends and chat with other viewers as the movie plays. Look for the Blu-ray version on store shelves December 9th.

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Are you still looking for a Blu-ray player? Vince already told you that a PlayStation 3 is the way to go. What? You don’t have four hundred bucks? Sheesh. Bummer. I guess the $289 Portable Blu-ray Super Multi Drive will have to suffice. While it’s not as “super” as the PS3 at playing video games, it can burn DVDs and play your favorite Blu-ray movies on the New MacBook, Pro and Air. That is, if you have favorites.

If only you had a couple extra bucks. You’d be able to get something that looks nothing like a cigarette case, plays the latest video games and Blu-ray discs but is about as portable as a skip. That’s where this multi drive shines, portability. It might look like a fake piece of shit, but it’s a fake piece of shit that’s going places.

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Back in May, we talked about Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and how the Blu-ray release would include BD-Live Internet-enabled extras and features. After viewing the above picture, it looks like you’ll have to read through 57 pages of Terms of Use before you can access your content. Who has time for that? Certainly not a mother with hyperactive children on her hands. Way to go, Disney.

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If there’s one thing that’ll interest you about Sony’s third generation internal Blu-ray optical drive, the BWU-300S, it’s not the specs. So, what if it can write single and dual layer BD-R discs at up to 8X speed, or if it writes DVDs at up to 16X, CDs up to 48X and supports DVD-RAM recording.

No, we don’t care about all of that. We care that this drive comes with a free movie, not the news about no DH DVD playback. So long as it comes with Men In Black on Blu-ray, we’ll buy it. That’s like – a fifteen dollar value. Unbelievable.

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Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make a digital copy of any of your DVDs as if it were an audio CD you wanted to import with iTunes? You can! I mean, you will once RealNetworks introduces it’s $30 software program: RealDVD. It’ll allow users to make a digital copy of an entire DVD, including all the extras and artwork from the box.

Let’s face it: Blu-ray is king these days and that sucks for all the loons who bought a library of DVD movies (which is everyone). Now that DVD is out the window, Hollywood could care less if you copy all of your DVDs and start selling them on your website. OK, that’s not true at all but at least it’s giving up the ban on digital backups. If you dare do it with Blu-ray discs, the peoples of Hollywood will hunt you down and kill you. Just prepare your hard drive beforehand, otherwise you’ll only be able to fit the first season of Dawson’s Creek on it, and we all know that the second season is way better.

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With HD DVD dead, Sony has a lot of time to spend with it’s right hand and a bottle of lotion.

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Just when you thought that the 400GB Blu-ray discs announced in early July couldn’t get any sweeter sounding, Pioneer renders it obsolete less than two months after. The standard size of a Blu-ray disc is 25 GB on a single layer and 50GB with a dual layer. Well, the fat cats at pioneer were not satisfied with even 16 layers of storage. It needed to go bigger. So, they crammed 25 layers on to the disc, with each layer containing 25GB of memory, totaling up to a whopping 500GB of storage space. Even with Buffalo’s 8x Blu-ray recorder, it’d be a difficult task to fill up 500GB.

Brendan Sheridan, Product Manager of Pioneer Europe NV, Multimedia Division: “With its strong support among the gaming, movie and PC industries, Blu-ray has become the de facto next generation storage system. …we envision the need for a technology that can support far greater capacities as HD streaming in particular becomes commonplace and users build larger files of digital content.”

With Blu-ray getting bigger and bigger, you’re going to need a player for all your friends to know how hip you are. What better than a Playstation 3 for all your media needs at a fraction of the price of other Blu-ray players.

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So you’re like Ryan and have a 50GB+ porn collection and you need to back it up, eh? You don’t own a file server and that’s not really up your alley, so that’s out. You’d burn it to a DVD except it’d take about a month before you finished. Simply deleting it isn’t an option. So what are you left to work with?

Buffalo’s latest Blu-ray drive is what. It comes in an internal and external version, supports burning single-layer BD-R discs at a stunning 8x. It can burn DL BD-R at 2x, DVDs at 16x and the standard 48x for CD-Rs. Don’t forget: it can play all the aforementioned formats as well. At ~$430 for the external version and ~$400 and about $375 for the internal drive. Essentially, the deal of the century if you own a Playstation 3.

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