All US households with televisions that use analog technology will be eligible for $40 discount coupons to buy digital converter boxes, according to the Commerce Department.

Due to the long Chinese New Year Holiday, Taiwan optical disc makers saw their revenues drop sequentially in February, with leading players CMC Magnetics and Ritek seeing revenue drops of 21.3% and 14.0%, respectively.

A post on the Doom9 forums has claimed to have found another set of device keys crucial to the unlocking of the AACS copy protection used by both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs.

Ricoh says that started shipping the new Double Layer DVD+R media with write speeds of up to 16x, significantly raising the standards for fast DL blank discs.

Sony has unveiled plans for its own virtual universe for the PlayStation 3 where users will be able to socialise, shop and even go to the movies -- all without setting foot outside in the real world.

Verbatim/Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation has issued a press release warning that a number of prominent to less known brands in Australia and New Zealand have been distributing certain recordable DVD models with false MCC MIDs (Media Identification Codes).

There's a tool in the war on piracy that's picking up steam, and its proponents are thrilled with what it can do. Dubbed "cGrid," the application is powerful and daunting to those caught in its snares, for it can boot users off the network in real-time if it suspects that they are engaging in P2P file sharing, or even if they are using so-called darknets. As you might expect, the entertainment industry loves it.

Software behemoth Microsoft is being accused of encouraging piracy to popularise its operating systems after threatening legal action against Indian resellers pirating its products.

THE BBC is to play nice with YouTube in an interesting handshake agreement that will see clips and trailers from entertainment, news and Worldwide channels appear on the mother and father of all video-sharing sites.

A European lawyer has threatened to initiate legal action against Microsoft in the light of complaints from 800 Xbox 360 customers that their discs have been scratched by the console's DVD drive.

Doubts have arisen about the effectiveness of a Windows key generator package that allegedly offered a means to circumvent Microsoft's anti-piracy protection.

A new standard for downloading movies and then burning them to DVD, called CSS Managed Recording, reached final approval during the DVD Forum in Tokyo last week. PCWorld reports that the standard will allow movies burned to DVD and watched on most standard DVD players while maintianing copy protection that prohibits unauthorized duplication.

Samsung Electronics, a maker of consumer devices and a supporter of the Blu-ray disk (BD) format is quietly selling laptops with HD DVD optical drives on its domestic market. This comes as a surprise, as Samsung earlier decided to scrap its consumers players that would play both BDs and competing HD DVDs.

A three-layer HD DVD disc with enough room for about 7 hours of high-definition video is still under development and hasn't been submitted for approval to the DVD Forum, the standard's governing body, despite reports to the contrary said a Toshiba spokesman.

LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling have made available for download a free piece of software called the LightScribe Simple Labeler, a labeling tool designed to make labeling easier.

Eighteen months after rival Apple Inc. raised the bar in the music player market with its video iPod, Sony Corp. will launch its first digital video Walkman.

Over stateside YouTube has been brought in as another resource in tracking down suspects that have been caught on video. Patrolman Brian Johnson posted a clip from a security camera showing two men using allegedly stolen credit cards at a Home Depot on YouTube. He then emailed about 300 people and organizations with the link saying he was looking the men.

Well known warez group 'paradox' has provided tools and information on how to trick a Vista installation (x86) into acting as if it is installed on an OEM machine, which requires no product activation. Manufacturers such as Dell distribute pre-installed Vista installations on new computers.

Netflix has delivered its 1 billionth DVD over the weekend, marking another milestone in the Internet rental service's evolution from a peculiar dot-com to a marquee attraction in millions of homes.

The first laptop computer to feature an HD DVD-R drive, Toshiba Corp.'s Qosmio Q30, went on sale in Japan over the weekend.