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O<I>prah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberley Elise, Beah Richards, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Albert Hall. Directed by Jonathan Demme. Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 (widescreen). Dolby Digital 5.1. 171 minutes. 1999. Touchstone Home Video 17243. R. $29.99.</I>

Flat-panel displays are moving up to the next level of performance, thanks to <A HREF="http://www.ibm.com/">International Business Machines</A>. On Wednesday, November 10, the company announced what observers called an "eye-popping" LCD screen with an astounding 123 pixels (picture elements) per square inch&mdash;more than twice the typical 55-per-square-inch pixel count of high-definition television screens. The almost-21-inch-diagonal screen, dubbed the QX20, is capable of resolutions as high as 2048x1536.

Here's proof that the early adopter plays a dangerous game: Less than a year after the official release of their hard-disk-based video recording system, <A HREF="http://www.replaytv.com">RePlay Networks</A> announced last week that it is releasing a major upgrade to its system. RePlay says the new device, named the RePlayTV 2020, is a personal video recorder with twice as much storage capacity as the company's current best-selling model, and&mdash;here's the part that tweaks early adopters&mdash;at no increase in price: 20 hours of storage for $699.

Hackers have succeeded in defeating the Digital Versatile Disc's copy-protection encryption, according to several reports that popped up in late October and early November. Source code for decrypting entire movies is now circulating on the Internet, and an underground trade in illicit copies has arisen.