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That 8-centimetre-wide dent in the tray of your DVD player is now explained. It’s designed to play small recordable discs from a new type of camcorder, the first of which will be launched by Hitachi this month. The DVD camcorders compress pictures and sound to the MPEG-2 standard, storing up to an hour of footage on the mini DVD. Users won’t need to invest in expensive FireWire cards for their PC either, because the new disc-cam records video at a much slower rate than Digital Video (DV) camcorders. This means users can transfer video to a PC—and vice versa—using a standard USB connection, at two or three times normal play speed.