Topic: News

Quanta Storage, the largest slim-type optical storage drive maker in Taiwan, expects to launch half-height, desktop-use DVD+RW drives in June and sample slim-type, notebook-use DVD+RW drives in August, the company said.

TiVo have that it will sell limited information about the viewing habits of its subscribers to advertisers and broadcasters. The company's new service will let broadcasters and advertisers subscribe to a quarterly audience-measurement report that will track viewing habits during prime-time shows. TiVo, which provides digital video recorder (DVR) services and devices, eventually plans to use its technology to provide data on consumer patterns for any show or commercial.

Software maker Pinnacle Systems have announced the release of a new version of Pinnacle Edition, the company's collection of video editing and DVD authoring tools for video professionals and advanced hobbyists. Version 5 includes under-the-hood improvements to speed processing, an expanded menu of special effects that can be viewed in real time as they're added to video segments and more editing tools for creating DVD menus and navigational features.

Datawrite: This week reported back huge sales increases following a minor dye change and a major price drop on their 4x Red DVD-R. They also inform us that they have a 4x version of their Yellow DVD-R due to arrive in Europe. They claim that the 4x Yellow which will be sold alongside the Red 4x, at an albeit higher price, is produced for them by Princo at the same factory, using the same production line, as their best selling 1x Yellow DVD-R.

O1ne Optical Products: Plan to introduce a Lead Data sourced 4x Disc in the next few weeks. Lead Data appears to be an excellent choice for 01ne Optical Products. The (relatively) new start-up media company said in a press release yesterday

“Our initial offerings to the market were sourced through a UK based brand; they have proven to be very successful. We felt it was time we started sourcing product direct from manufacturers and Lead Data is the ideal strategic long term partner for us. This new alliance will allow us to sell high quality products at a more competitive price and allow us to bring products to market faster due to Lead Data’s focus on R&D.”

Editors note: Lead Data, although relatively unknown in Europe, are one of the big four DVD manufacturers in the world and at the moment oem for Sony.

Memorex: Have dipped their toe into the UK market with their release of the new Memorex 4x DVD disc. The disc is produced for Memorex by CMC.

Flash has come up with the goods once again: you can read the world's first Pioneer 106 review here.

If the music and movie industry won't lower the price of CDs and DVDs, there's only one thing to do: punters should stop buying them. Just ask the Malaysian government. This week, Deputy Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Minister Datuk S Subramaniam told buyers to quit spending - temporarily, at least - to force the industry to reduce prices.

Sony's Japanese ISP is adopting digital rights management technology that lets consumers play downloaded movie files from the hard drive, while reducing piracy risks. A subsidiary of the electronics maker Sony is to sell downloadable movie files that self-destruct after a given time.

A study published this week in the journal Nature offers evidence that action video games can substantially improve players' visual and perceptual acuity. The research was undertaken in the US by scientists who sought to examine the effect of action video games on perceptual and motor skills. They found, through a series of four experiments, that habitual players of action video games -- particularly first-person shooter games -- tend to perceive objects more quickly and are better than non-players at handling simultaneous tasks.

Royal Philips Electronics has introduced a highly integrated chipset, optical pickup unit (OPU), firmware and reference design for the industry's highest-speed DVD+R/RW recorders. The design incorporates new technology to minimise recording errors caused by common disk defects such as fingerprints while the software and chipset, based on Philips Nexperia streaming media technology, will allow consumers to create 4.7GB DVDs of home videos, photo albums and PC data in less than 15 minutes or half the time of existing drives, Philips said in a statement.

The California Supreme Court appeared divided Thursday on whether courts can block computer users from posting on the Internet the computer codes to copy DVD movies. The dispute centers on San Francisco computer programmer Andrew Bunner, who in 1999 posted the code to an encryption program that the movie industry says is used to unlawfully replicate thousands of movies a day. The DVD Copy Control Association, an arm of Hollywood studios, sued saying the association, not Bunner or others, controls the program called the content scramble system, or CSS, which prevents unauthorized copying of a movie sold in the DVD format.

As millions of songs figuratively fly off the shelves of Apple Computer's recently launched iTunes Music Store, analysts are looking at Amazon.com as one of the likeliest candidates to take the next crack at the retail music-download business.

AOL Time Warner's settlement with Microsoft yesterday brings the software giant a powerful ally in extending its digital media technology--part of Microsoft's plan to keep Windows the world's dominant computer operating system and expand onto new devices. The deal allows--but does not require--AOL Time Warner to use Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series software and future versions of the multimedia technology, including its digital rights management (DRM) tool for securing music and video files from piracy.

Sony have introduced the PSX, a follow-up to the hugely popular PlayStation 2, and touted it as a device that creates a new entertainment category. In addition to the basic features of a game console, PSX will offer a DVD recorder, a 120GB hard drive, a TV tuner, an Ethernet port, a USB 2.0 port and a Memory Stick slot.

Dvd-Recordable.org has, since its inception last year, become the premier site for DVD writing, news, reviews and help. We are the first in the world to have the new Pioneer 106 drive to test review. Our DVD guru Flash has been putting this drive through its paces so you can expect a comprehensive review here in the next few days.

If you would like to see some pictures of the new market leader from Pioneer click here.

Remember: you saw the pics and read the review here first :)

Futuremark have said in a statement that Nvidia tweaked software needed to run its new GeForce FX 5900 processor to distort performance in Futuremark's 3DMark 03 testing application. The company said drivers for the new Nvidia chip were altered to detect activity characteristic of a benchmark and adjust performance accordingly.

Philips sees the stagnant market for its semiconductors recovering to 12 percent growth, driven in part by dvd recorders which will become home entertainment hubs, its executives said today.

While Apple Computer grabs publicity for its new 99 cent music download store, Microsoft is quietly preparing for a counterattack by improving its own technology for supporting subscription music services. Services such as Pressplay, which uses Microsoft technology, have been put on the defensive with news that Apple has sold more than 2 million downloads since April 28, the day its iTunes Music Store launched. But Microsoft is betting that new security enhancements planned for later this year could make renting music, rather than owning it, more attractive to consumers.

Sonic Solutions announced today that NEC Europe, one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions, has selected Sonic MyDVD(R)4 and Sonic CinePlayer(TM) 1.5 as the DVD creation and PC playback software to power their ND family of DVD recordable drive products.

Japan-based Pioneer recently stopped ordering DVD-ROM chip sets from VIA Optical Solution (VOS), a Taiwanese optical chip designer, according to VOS parent VIA Technologies.

DivX Networks have released their much anticipated DivX encoding software. This could really make video encoding mainstream.