Infuriatingly restrictive DRM aside, Panasonic's FreeSat+ Blu-ray burning DVR brings some new capabilities to the UK, apparently enough to impress Home Cinema Choice. A few downsides, like ITV marking its HD broadcasts Copy Never preventing any disc backups, and an inability to connect to other devices on the network didn't take away its DVR features, h.264 compression capabilities and solid Blu-ray playback. Of course the entry price for the DMR-BS850 is high, but take a look at the rest of their notes before deciding whether or not all those arrows and padlocks are worth the trouble.

We're chalking up the lack of Blu-ray archival talk to the ridiculous price of BD-R media, but now that prices are slowly but surely beginning to sink somewhat, it seems that Panasonic is taking advantage of the situation. Hiroyuki Hasegawa of Panasonic's AVC Networks Company recently stated that "from an environmental perspective, Blu-ray and other optical discs are promising for archival purposes." He delivered that quote while giving a seminar on the current state of digital archives, and he also made mention that Blu-ray Discs were superior to other media including HDDs and magnetic tapes in terms of "non-contact recording and playback, removability, random accessibility and long product life." Quite honestly, we have serious doubts that BDs are superior to HDDs in most situations, but Mr. Hasegawa pointed out that discs were better suited for "long-term storage of fixed data." Call us crazy, but we're totally waiting for the rebuttal here.

For camcorder owners with mind enough to know what Blu-ray is (and own at least a Blu-ray player), yet not enough time / knowledge to bother archiving your footage onto the format, The Photo Archival Company is ready and willing to take your dough. The archiving outfit has formally introduced a solution that involves placing old (albeit valued) content on USB hard drives, camcorder tapes, etc. onto Blu-ray Discs for safe keeping, though there's no mention of just how costly this convenience will end up being. But no, it won't be cheap.

[Thanks, Anthony]

If you've stumbled upon the perfect solution for archiving your DVD collection and streaming it via a DLNA server (you know, like the PlayStation 3), this week's Ask Engadget question is just begging for your input. Head on over and give those two pennies a toss!

Archive master Delkin has stepped up to the plate once more, this time aiming to please those with way more horror films than a typical CD-R can hold. The Archival Gold Blu-ray recordable media is the first of its kind "guaranteed to preserve data safely for over 200 years." The 4x discs feature the outfit's proprietary ScratchArmor technology, which is designed to fend off the terrifying effects of UV light, heat, humidity and careless fingernails. The units are available now in 1/5/10/25 packs for an undisclosed price.