To print: Select File and then Print from your browser's menu.

    -----------------------------------------------

     This story was printed from CdrInfo.com,

     located at http://www.cdrinfo.com.

    -----------------------------------------------

A French company has developed a DVD with suicidal intentions, and self-destructs after a few hours.

The self-destruction procedure is caused by an extra layer of coating that reacts to an oxidisation process. This process is triggered as soon as the disc is exposed to air and it's bottom side becomes black-unreadable by the drive laser. The particular DVD can be read from any DVD player or game console and has a life spand of 24 hours.

Flexplay Technologies, based in New York, announced a DVD with a 48-hour life spand and its manufacturers claim that self-destructive DVDs are much cheaper to produce. The company also says there are no ways to repair the disc after the weathering process has made it unreadable. Solutions to repair the disc would be extremely complex.

The products would give consumers easy access to recently released titles, both movies and music, without worrying about returns, late fees or scratched discs. The product name of the new media will be DVD-D and 700 movies are planned to be available on DVD-D.

Despite the growing interest from big film studios, disposable DVDs haven't been much of a success. According to some reports, demand for EZ-D has fallen completely flat, and the retail chains carrying the discs have decided to stop stocking the format.