Western Digital Introduces My Passport AV Portable Media Drives
WD today introduced its new My Passport™ AV portable media drives. Designed specifically for video storage and playback, the new My Passport AV portable media drives deliver a plug-and-play experience for digital media enthusiasts. Available now at select retailers and WD's online store, the My Passport AV portable media drive is offered with 320 GB of capacity.
A large and increasing number of game consoles, camcorders, TVs, DVRs, Blu-ray players and media players, including the WD TV® Media Player family, allow consumers to connect a USB drive and play the multimedia content from the drive on an HD TV. The My Passport AV portable media drive is designed to meet the requirements of this demanding video streaming environment. It delivers the formatting and low-power consumption that assures out-of-the-box compatibility with many leading CE (consumer electronics) devices.
WD worked to ensure that the My Passport AV portable media drives operate seamlessly with the Direct Copy feature offered in Sony's new Handycam® video recorders. Direct Copy lets Handycam users offload and archive HD video directly to a My Passport AV portable media drive without a computer, creating room to shoot more HD videos when their Handycam hard drive becomes full.

Today, CDRLabs brings you an in depth look at Leadtek's MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card, the WinFast PxVC1100. This low profile PCI Express card features Toshiba’s SpursEngine SE1000 processor which allows it to encode HD content in less than real time and improve the quality of upconverted video. The PxVC1100 also comes bundled with TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. Using this software, the card is able to encode virtually any video file at resolutions ranging from iPod to HD and at bit rates as high as 50Mb/s.
