Topic: News

Among DVD+R/-R discs of varying speeds, 16x discs will account for the largest portion in terms of shipment in beginning the third quarter of this year at the earliest, according to Taiwanese makers of optical discs.

Press Release: Microboards have unveiled a manual duplicator that records ten full DVDs in under seven minutes. The unique controller architecture used by the CopyWriter Tower makes this tower-style disc copier the fastest available on the market.

At a three day press event in Bordeaux Sony this week announced it is going to add Blu-ray and DSD (Direct Stream Digital) to its Vaio series of PCs and notebooks.

A Finnish based company called Viralg is predicting the end of unauthorised file sharing. The company claims their patented “overwrite” technology can mix files on a P2P network, corrupting downloads and rendering them worthless to play.

The tenth DVD Conference in Asia, an annual meeting of the DVD Forum organized by the Opto-Electronics Systems & Laboratories (OES) of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), was held in Taipei on April 12, with an agenda focusing on progress of standard specifications, licensing, certifications and market outlook of HD-DVD, a next-generation blue-laser DVD format developed by Toshiba and NEC.

DVD visionary Flash has posted in his latest eagerly received review: Ritek 16x Silver DVD-R. They might not be the sexiest discs on the planet but Flash thinks "this media has produced good burns with perfect speed curves each time and is a very good media at 12x speed burning".

Apple Computer blew away Wall Street expectations Wednesday by reporting its second-quarter earnings soared six-fold to $290 million thanks to booming sales of iPods and computers. Revenue rose 70 percent.

British sources have confirmed that the next generation Xbox is indeed called Xbox 360, that the logo is a simple, round nexus, and that the console itself has a concave design - and a platinum white finish.

The recording industry intends to sue hundreds of college students accused of illegally distributing music and movies across Internet2, the super-fast computer network connecting leading universities for researching the next generation of the Internet, industry officials said Tuesday.

Music fans could soon be able to download their favourite tunes over digital radio under plans from UBC Media. The owner of Classic Gold analogue and digital stations is investing in technology to let listeners push a button on their radio and transfer songs to their computer.

The US Congress is pondering laws to force digital music companies to use a single, unified DRM system, in order to allow songs purchased from any download service to run on any hardware.

In the Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle, it looks like the Blu-ray side has been the first to blink. Ryoji Chubachi, Sony's president-elect, said at a news conference last week that he would be open to talking to the DVD Forum to merge Sony's Blu-ray format with the Toshiba-developed and Forum-backed HD-DVD format.

Ritek and CMC Magnetics are preparing to begin production of HD-DVD (High-Density Digital Versatile Disc), a blue-laser DVD standard of the next generation developed by Toshiba and NEC, discs in the third or fourth quarter of this year, according to the two companies.

Microsoft have said it would unveil the next generation of its Xbox video game console in a May the 13th special on cable music and entertainment channel MTV.

Police have recovered more than 1,000 pirate DVDs after searching two cars following observations at a car boot sale in Yorkshire.

The Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories (OES) of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have debuted Taiwan's first self-developed blue-laser DVD pick-up head (PUH) at an OES press event in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Clover Systems has announced the release of the new DVX DVD Analyzer. This new version of Clover's popular low-cost quality control tool can measure DVD error rates at up to 16X on DVD-ROM and DVD±R, including dual layer discs, and CDs at up to 40X. It can also measure Beta and Jitter, and check the quality of blank media.

LG Korea have released a utility that enables users to automatically check for new firmware. Unfortunately the tool does not work with all LG optical drives but the company is planning to add support for more.

Sony's PSP is turning into a great tool for Web browsing, comics reading and online chat -- and it also happens to play video games, movies and music, if you prefer that sort of thing.

Sony will this month ship its latest hard drive-based personal digital music player, this time adding a removable battery to the feature set and an anti-impact system to the unit's hard disk.