With a week to go before its dual-format high-def release, pre-orders for 'Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series' have broken new ground on Amazon's top sellers list. Meanwhile, recent Amazon rankings appear to indicate a turnaround in HD DVD sales.

The short era of small internet radio stations is over after the Copyright Royalty Board have given the thumbs up to new fees to broadcast copyrighted material.

Google is ready to introduce a copyright protection tool that helps media owners to automatically report acts of piracy on its YouTube video site, according to Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Nero have announced it will release of the stand alone version of BackItUp 2, a complete data backup and disaster recovery solution.

HD DVD announced it is the first of either format to reach 100,000 stand-alone players sold in the US market, saying Tuesday the price drop helped to spur sales of the product. Not included are PC or Xbox 360 drive sales.

Record numbers of film and TV downloads are threatening high street DVD and video shops, a study has found.

Toshiba has released a new firmware update for it's second generation HD-DVD players.

Just after the previous update a couple of days ago, LUK released another new version of ImgBurn, 2.3.2.0.

Lite-On IT has geared up it's Research & Development teams to producing burners featuring the 16x recording standard recently finalised by the DVD+RW Alliance and may begin volume production by the end of this year.

A Sony spokesperson has confirmed that the company is "considering" producing a new version of PlayStation 3 with a larger hard drive.

The latest patched version of the 'super secure' AACS next generation DVD standard has been hacked already.

Neither Blu-ray nor HD-DVD are close to winning any new format wars, according to research compiled by Sony.

Retailers WH Smith and Play.com have both knocked £25 off the price of the PS3, offering the console for just under £400.

For the past four years, a format battle has been waged over the next generation of DVDs. In 2003, the DVD Forum, a consortium headed by Toshiba, endorsed the HD DVD as its preferred format. A few months later, the Blu-ray Disc Association (spearheaded by Sony) announced that it was launching a competing format.

Toshiba has filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission and sued 17 companies in U.S. District Court, alleging that the companies are infringing on patents related to DVD technologies.

A next-generation DVD security group has responded to hack attacks that allow unfettered access to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD content by pulling the encryption keys of PC applications associated with the attack.

Following the launch of Sony's PS3 Folding@home initiative, where the latent PS3 power in idle machines is used to help calculate research for Stanford University, commercial businesses could soon make use of similar scheme.

Plextor has started to ship the TurboPlex PX-800A DVD Super Multi Drive. Fully compatible with the new Windows Vista operating system, the new DVD+/-R/RW CD-R/RW drive also boasts a new level of performance and features, including 12X DVD-RAM and a software bundle that includes Roxio Easy Media Creator 9.

Although Hitachi-LG, Toshiba-Samsung, Lite-on IT and Japanese brands have been making efforts to lower production costs of Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD DVD burners to promote the adoption of the two blue-laser standards, CMC Magnetics and Ritek, the top two makers of optical discs, are comparatively conservative about investing in the production of blank BD-R and/or HD DVD-R discs to match the potential demand for such burners, according to industry sources in Taiwan.

Matsushita Electric Industrial and CMC Magnetics Corporation (CMC) jointly announced today the settlement of a patent infringement suit that MEI brought against CMC and two of its US affiliates in the United States regarding MEI's DVD patents.