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Video: 5
Audio: 4
Extras: 4
When a movie is rated PG for "quirky situations," that alone should build curiosity. Throw in another perfect team-up between director Tim Burton, star Johnny Depp, and composer Danny Elfman, plus story by Roald Dahl, and you've got a visual and musical delight for young and old. Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore, who starred in Finding Neverland with Depp) has lived in the shadow of the Wonka Chocolate Factory all of his short life, yearning to see inside. Willy Wonka's desire to find an heir to his empire causes him to hide golden tickets in five Wonka bars, which are sent around the world. The children who discover the tickets will be admitted entry into the factory, along with one guardian. Charlie, the fittingly pale, poor, and very kind British lad that he is, finds the last golden ticket. Along with his grandfather and the other winners, Charlie goes on a wondrous tour of the chocolate factory up the hill, learning about its secrets, including the Oompa-Loompas, the miniature muscles behind the factory.

On-demand movie viewers are happy to pay an extra dollar to avoid ads. And they prefer conventional to convergent delivery media. Those are the conclusions of a DIGDIA survey. It grappled with two questions at once. Given a tradeoff between advertising and price, how would viewers prefer their movies: with ads for a buck less, or without ads for a buck more? Also, what on-demand (or on-demand-ish) delivery medium would they prefer: TV, PC, or DVD? Here are the results:

Freedb, a key player in open-source CD databases, has succumbed to tensions among its founders. The site is still up but its future is uncertain. If you didn't already know, CD databases provide metadata lookup services to the likes of iTunes and the Windows Media Player, enabling them to display artist, song, album, genre, etc. Without them your iPod would not be nearly as versatile at organizing music. The grandpappy of them all was CDDB, founded in 1993 as a volunteer-driven project. When CDDB went commercial in 2000 as Gracenote, Freedb and other groups split off to maintain their own open-source databases on a nonprofit basis. The open-source services appear most often in PC-based software including rippers, taggers, and players other than iTunes and WMP. Freedb is also used by AudioReQuest, a consumer-level high-end server product. Freedb is survived by Musicbrainz, another open-source database. The biggest commercial databases are All Music Guide's LASSO (used by Windows Media Player and MusicMatch) and the category-leading Gracenote (used by iTunes).

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<LI>Price: $2,500</LI>
<LI>Channels/Power: Five channels; 250-Watts into 8 ohms/385-Watts into 4 ohms </LI>
<LI>Inputs: Single-ended</LI>
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