Scott Wilkinson

As the song says, it's the most wonderful time of the year—or the most dreadful, depending on whether or not you plan to join the buying frenzy on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the traditional start of the holiday shopping season. Many stores open at an ungodly hour and offer seemingly outrageous deals on certain products to get people in the door, hoping that they'll buy more than they bargained for and put the store's accounts in the black for the year, which is why it's called Black Friday—either that, or it might be due to all the black eyes resulting from fights over the last remaining $60 Blu-ray player.

I've been looking at some Black Friday previews, and I've found some apparently great deals on flat panels, Blu-ray players, and other home-theater gear. Unfortunately, many stores do not reveal the model number of the sale items, making it difficult to judge just how good these deals really are, and as far as I can tell, none of them are flagship products. Still, there are a few that I think are good enough to share with you…

After denying it was considering bankruptcy, Blockbuster is closer than ever to calling it quits. According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said in a financial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that they had "substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern."

Now in its fourth year since the format was launched, Blu-ray remains a bit enigmatic. Of course, most early adopters and movie enthusiasts eagerly embrace it, and rightly so&#151;Blu-ray provides the best picture and sound quality you can get from a home-theater source. But its success in the mass market is less clear, at least so far. To assess this and other issues related to the state of Blu-ray, the <A href="http://www.dvdinformation.com/">Digital Entertainment Group (DEG)</A>, an industry-funded, non-profit organization that promotes various types of home entertainment, hosted a day-long conference last week at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles, calling it Blu-Con 2.0.

In a move to protect against illegal copying and large-scale piracy while allowing consumers the flexibility to manage and enjoy copies of their legally purchased content, the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has adopted the most comprehensive content-management system (CMS) ever employed on an optical-disc format. The Blu-ray CMS includes three primary components: Advanced Access Content System (AACS), ROM Mark, and BD+.