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Review of sony DVDirect: A standalone DVD burner and video capture device that works flawlessly Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Ideally it would be stand-alone so it does not require a personal computer for ripping or capturing video and then burning it to DVD. sony has come out with such a device called the sony DVDirect Stand-Alone DVD Burner. Priced at a little over $200 retail, this device allows you to feed it a video and audio stream, which is then burned to DVD in real time. The selectable inputs include "Super-Video," which is the super VHS; composite video, which is an RCA connector; and even the sony i.Link, which is a 4-pin firewire connector found on video cameras.

It's also worth noting that compared to capturing video on your PC and then burning it to DVD using your computer, this sony DVDirect device is a cinch to use. It saves hours of time waiting for your computer to compress DVD files. With the sony DVDirect device, the process is simple and quick.

The Sima SCC-2 has so far worked flawlessly in combination with the sony DVDirect burner, and in my own tests conducted solely for the purpose of this review, I have been able to make personal backup copies of feature movies that I own with no problem and little loss of quality. Ultimately, however, I am not doing this routinely, since the backup copy does not contain any of the DVD features such as subtitles, Spanish voiceovers, scene selection and other "special features." I've found that I prefer to just use the original DVDs.

This is no surprise coming from sony, which is a company that seems to be more than a bit paranoid about intellectual property, but there are plenty of ways around it for those who want to make personal backup copies of movies they've purchased. Before I explain this, let me emphasize that I in no way intend to give readers the impression that I support pirating of movies, because I do not. I do support making backup copies of movies for personal use, especially if you're traveling, as long as you continue to own and maintain possession of the original movie.

But on the sony DVDirect device, the audio and video stay in sync exactly the way they should. The next beneficial feature is that there's no computer required. You just plug in a video and audio source, and you're ready to go. However, there is no video monitor on this device, so unless you have a video splitter and can set up a separate screen to monitor what you're sending, you won't be able to tell where you are in the movie you're recording.

The selectable inputs include "Super-Video," which is the super VHS; composite video, which is an RCA connector; and even the sony i.Link, which is a 4-pin firewire connector found on video cameras. With all of these options, you can burn a DVD with this device from almost any imaginable source, including a video camera, a VHS player or another DVD player.

Media giants want to criminalize personal copying of movie DVDs to portable electronic devices Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

They are big brother intellectual property policies, where these companies would even install secret spyware on your computer, which is what sony BMG did to millions of users without their knowledge, to prevent you from copying their music, meanwhile exposing your computer to hacker attacks. That's history, that's already been done. That's the way sony BMG treats customers, and if we leave intellectual property laws up to the media giants like sony, we'll all be branded criminals sooner or later. So bottom line: Rip all the movies you want.

The intellectual property philosophies of organizations like sony BMG are not only wrong, but dangerous. They are big brother intellectual property policies, where these companies would even install secret spyware on your computer, which is what sony BMG did to millions of users without their knowledge, to prevent you from copying their music, meanwhile exposing your computer to hacker attacks. That's history, that's already been done.

It goes back to the classic sony VHS recorder lawsuits decades ago. In fact, if sony had won those lawsuits, then all VHS recorders would have been outlawed and people recording TV shows on VHS tapes would have been charged with piracy. In my opinion you are doing nothing wrong if you own a movie on DVD and rip it to other player formats such as PlayStation portable, iPod video, cell phone video, or any other video format. Of course, if you go out and rent movies, and then rip them, then you are in fact doing something wrong, because you don't own that movie, you're just renting it.

That's the way sony BMG treats customers, and if we leave intellectual property laws up to the media giants like sony, we'll all be branded criminals sooner or later. So bottom line: Rip all the movies you want. Just make sure you own the DVD first, and don't share those movie rips with friends. But to protect your rights, fight against DRM (Digital Rights Management) schemes that force consumers to buy the same content over and over again for every new device or media format that comes along. Want to stay informed about the fight against DRM? See DefectiveByDesign.org.

The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest Dan Buettner See book keywords and concepts

Towering electronic lights blinked on every building: sony, Hitachi, Coca-Cola. As our taxi crept down gridlocked streets, raindrops splattered on the windshield in garish red, blue, and green blotches of refracted light. At an intersection near our hotel, we passed a bubble tea stand, a shop selling electronic merchandise, a Pizza Hut, and a McDonald's. I thought: This is the longevity Shangri-la? The first morning, Greg and I caught up with photographer David McLain and assistant Rico Noce for breakfast in the hotel restaurant.

Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power Mark Schapiro See book keywords and concepts

March 2007 hit like a power surge for Panasonic, Intel, sony, and the rest of the global electronics industry. Eight months after RoHS, the EU's directive banning all hazardous chemicals and minerals in electronic devices, the Chinese equivalent came into force: the "Administration on the Control of Pollution Caused by Electronic Information Products" sent a signal that China would no longer allow itself to be the world's dumping ground for hazardous products.

For many mainstream producers —Panasonic, sony, Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard, and others—complying with the restrictions in China or Europe or japan (home to several of the major multinational producers) is now part of the business plan. The bulk of Kirschener's business is now consulting on the environmental standards of foreign countries, because in the United States there are no chemical controls over the production of electronics. "What the Europeans say stays, stays," he said. "And what they say goes, goes. The [U.S.] federal government is nowhere to be found.

Sony Play Stations on the Rotterdam docks. The Netherlands, one of the more densely populated countries, saw the trouble from electrical waste coming early, and in 1999 restricted the four toxic metals that would four years later be banned from all of Europe. Customs inspectors found cadmium in the Play Station cables and impounded the entire shipment on the spot. Coming at the height of the Christmas season, it was an impoundment heard around the world. The Economist reported that it cost the company close to one hundred million dollars in lost sales.

Media giants want to criminalize personal copying of movie DVDs to portable electronic devices Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

In fact, if sony had won those lawsuits, then all VHS recorders would have been outlawed and people recording TV shows on VHS tapes would have been charged with piracy. In my opinion you are doing nothing wrong if you own a movie on DVD and rip it to other player formats such as PlayStation portable, iPod video, cell phone video, or any other video format. Of course, if you go out and rent movies, and then rip them, then you are in fact doing something wrong, because you don't own that movie, you're just renting it. When you return the movie for rental, you should delete the files.

The Field - The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe Lynne Mctaggart See book keywords and concepts

This small video camera would be attached to a 19-inch sony Trinitron in another room, two hallways and four doors away. This would allow the starer to view the subject peacefully without the possibility of any form of sensory cueing. Pure chance, as arrived at by artful mathematical calculation - a computer's random algorithm - governed the starer's script. Whenever the script dictated, the starer would stare intently at the subject on the monitor and attempt to gain his or her attention.

Product review: The MH-C9000 WizardOne NiMH battery charger from Powerex Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

It has replaced my La Crosse BC-900 and an entire bank of cheap chargers from Duracell, Energizer and sony that I'm giving away to Goodwill. Review summary for the MH-C9000 WizardOne battery charger from MaHa / Powerex Advantages: Status display screen is simply amazing. Extreme brightness is achieved from a luminescent background surface that lights up evenly across the entire display (looks like a mini plasma screen). "Analyze" feature lets you test the actual capacity of your NiMH batteries. This is invaluable for knowing which batteries are still performing well vs.

The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest Dan Buettner See book keywords and concepts

By now I expected her to be a senior executive at sony or Hitachi. Instead, she'd left Tokyo, he said, and moved to the island of Yaku Shima, where she lived with her husband, a schoolteacher, and their two children. When I phoned her, she was ebullient. "Mr. Dan!" she said. "It makes me happy, really, to hear your voice." I told her about my new project in Okinawa and said I hoped she could join us. "Dan," she replied, "you know I loved Quest, and for me it was really something quite powerful in my life. But now I have two small children, and I cannot leave them.

Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown David Steinman See book keywords and concepts

Our good friends at the government Energy Star program have been involved with NRDC scientists and industry executives to develop standby power specs based on his work, and major manufacturers such as sony and IBM plan to reduce standby power consumption in all products. Once again, government is seeding the market first with its vast purchasing powers, as federal agencies are now required to buy only these new power-stingy appliances. We're even making headway in Beijing.

Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power Mark Schapiro See book keywords and concepts

Dell, Apple, Ericsson, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Panasonic, sony, and Philips. The United States is finding itself surrounded by major trading partners adopting the European Union's regulations, prompting significant changes in the industry's approach to the poisons in their products. Tech Forecasters, a high-tech consulting and design firm, estimated that the worldwide costs for implementing RoHS could amount to twenty billion dollars industry-wide over the next decade—a tiny percent of the nearly trill ion-dollar-a-year global electronics trade.

Energizer Batteries Exposed: NewsTarget Investigation Reveals Truth About "D" Rechargeable Batteries Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Recommend honest brands are sony, Sanyo and Powerex, all of which are available in much higher capacities than the Energizer "D" battery (at about the same cost). I believe that rechargeable batteries are an important "green living" technology that can help consumers be less wasteful in their use of valuable earth resources. NiMH batteries can be reused 1,000 times before being thrown away, greatly reducing landfill and the introduction of toxic metals into the environment.

Product review: The MH-C9000 WizardOne NiMH battery charger from Powerex Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Powerex, Sanyo and sony were the best three overall.) Some batteries that claimed to perform at 2700mAh only performed at 1900mAh! A lot of NiMH batteries are just plain bad quality. They'll wear out after only a few dozen cycles instead of delivering the 1000 cycles you should expect from a quality NiMH battery. That's why I've put my reputation behind only one brand of battery: Powerex. These batteries (which we also sell at www.BetterLifeGoods.com) are among the best I've found in the industry (and I've searched resources across Asia, the U.S. and Europe).

BeliefWorks: The Art of Living Your Dreams Ray Dodd See book keywords and concepts

Hesamura has been filmed by sony Corporation's Extra Sensory Perception and Excitation Research Laboratory (ESPER) and by other paranormal researchers. To this day, no one has found a rational explanation for every trick he performs. Hesamura claims he started as a boy trying to move insects with his mind. He practiced every day and after a few years he began to see real results. "Anyone can do this with practice," he says. At the end of each show Hesamura gives a short lecture about how our thoughts affect reality. He admonishes the dinner crowd, "Pay attention to your thoughts!

Neuros MPEG4 Recorder does what it promises to do well, but there's room for improvement Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

So this is the opposite of the sony BMG people, who believe that nothing should be shared and everything should be proprietary. The fact that Neuros is an open-source community product makes it far more interesting. One of the features sorely missing from this product is a customizable time limit on the recording. There is a feature where you can limit your recording to one hour, two hours, or three hours, but those are the only choices. What if you have a movie that is 97 minutes? I don't want to have to sit there viewing it for 97 minutes so that I can hit stop.

The iRiver PMP-100 series: A product with the typical strengths and weaknesses of Korean technology Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

At this time, I can't recommend a better video player because I think the market is just shaping up right now. The sony PlayStation portable, or PSP, is in many ways a better video player, although it has its own limitations, which will be covered in another review. For now, keep your eyes open for new products. Personally, I would stick with products made in Japan, including products from Apple, Creative or other companies that have a good reputation for quality control.

DVD copy warnings, movie studio paranoia, and the effort to turn customers into criminals Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

The movie studios don't get it either, and companies like sony BMG definitely do not get it. This is the digital age, and content owners would be well advised to stop investing so much effort in treating their paying customers like criminals. Like a lot of customers, I have no problem whatsoever paying for downloadable videos, music or audio books, as long as I can move those files to my laptop, portable media device or mp3 player. If I'm going to pay for content, I want to actually be able to use it and not be imprisoned by some proprietary technology that assumes I'm a criminal.

Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About it Sue Palmer See book keywords and concepts

Ryu Murakami, novelist and film director, has pointed out the almost certain connection between hikikomori and 'gizmos like the new sony PlayStation, which comes equipped with an Internet terminology and a DVD player ... [and] inevitably fixes people in their individual space'. But national anxiety about the phenomenon has not in any way dimmed enthusiasm for virtual existence. Psychiatrist Satoru Saito, who researches the condition, relates it to a more general withdrawal into social isolation: 'I fear Japan itself is becoming hikikomori. It is a nation that does not like to communicate.

The Living Energy Universe Gary E. Schwartz and Linda G. S. Russek See book keywords and concepts

After we were given a sony state-of-the-art professional digital video camera, Linda and I realized how we could use this unique camera to visualize systemic memory in a novel way. This camera makes it possible to slow down the feedback process—that is, make the process take more time—so that one can literally see the memory process occur frame by frame by frame. Linda and 1 spent hours witnessing systemic memory expressed in very slow motion. We saw simple patterns grow dynamically and complexly, a sequence of time-delayed temporal patterning never before witnessed by the human eye.

20 Years of Censored News Carl Jensen See book keywords and concepts

The dominant ten are Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation Limited (Murdoch), sony, Telecommunications, Inc., Seagram (TV, movies, cable, books, and music), Westinghouse, Gannett, and General Electric. Bagdikian concludes that the warning expressed in the first edition of his book, "Media power is political power," has come to pass to a degree once considered unthinkable. 2. The United States and its Contra-Drug Connection 1987 SYNOPSIS: Though mounting evidence, with substantive and alarming implications in terms of U.S.

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ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.