U-Tech Media, the largest producer of pre-recorded discs in Taiwan, is preparing to produce, both HD-DVD and Blu-ray movie discs, with volume production to begin in the first half of next year, according to the company.

TiVo have announced they will begin testing a feature to let some subscribers transfer recorded television programming to Apple iPod digital music players or Sony's PlayStation portable devices.

US analyst firm iSuppli said it had ripped apart an Xbox 360 to find out just how much the components cost.

The highly controversial XCP digital rights management (DRM) technology bundled by Sony on 52 of its audio CD albums can be defeated by applying a small piece of tape to the discs, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Ritek accounted for 20.0% of the total global shipment volume for DVD+R/-R discs, 21.5% for DVD+RW/-RW/-RAM (rewritable) discs and 18.7% for CD-RW discs for the third quarter of this year, the largest market share of each sector, according to Japan-based market research firm Fujiwara-Rothchild.

Alera Technologies announced last week its 1:4 DVD/CD Tower Publisher LS that supports up to 4 simultaneous DVD/CD Copies, Recordings, or produces up to 4 LightScribe labeled discs.

Resident DVD virtuoso Flash has an on-going campaign to find the best discs in the 16x market. In this review he looks at Europe's best selling 16x DVD-R, the Datawrite Titanium. Why is this disc so astonishingly popular? Well Flash concludes "these discs produced almost perfect burns in all but one of my drives (The Pioneer 110D) and currently can be purchased at a very competitive price so I would advise check your compatibility and snap this media up whilst you can." You can read the full review here.

RIAA president Cary Sherman has backed Sony's use of spyware rootkits and claims that other companies do it all the time.

Panasonic will next month begin sampling what it claims is the first optical drive control chipset capable of writing to any recordable or re-writeable disc format. Well, all except HD DVD, that is.

The discs most users will likely purchase to replace DVDs over the next few years will be double-layer DVDs, while further out the Blu-ray standard appears to be winning the battle against HD-DVD, according to Ritek.

The chairman and president of Japanese electronics group Pioneer are to step down, taking responsibility for a downturn in business.

Re-recordable HD DVD discs will be branded 'HD DVD-RW', the DVD Forum confirmed at its most recent steering committe last week.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) president Benjamin S. Feingold has announced that authoring has been completed on the first Blu-ray Disc (BD) to contain a full-length, high-definition feature film. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle was compressed and authored in MPEG 2 full high-definition (1920 x 1080) by Sony Pictures’ Digital Authoring Center (DAC) and is now being shipped to BD hardware companies for player testing.

NEC has said its first DVD burners with Labelflash technology will be available from December onwards. Labelflash burns custom motifs, lettering or images onto the top side of DVD media.

DVD genius Flash has developed a new way of looking at media quality and value for money. Read all about it at his Media Quality & Value for Money Spreadsheet.

MIT has unveiled its $100 (£58) laptop computer to the United Nations technology summit in Tunisia and said that it hopes to make millions of the devices to give to the developing countries of the world.

Crackers claim to have found a new vulnerability in the software running Sony's PSP that could allow them to run so-called home-brew applications on the device. A user posted a description of the hack, as well as files that help users perform it, on the PSP3d.com enthusiast website.

Sony have released a complete list of its audio CDs that include the XCP protection technology, adding that they will shortly release new versions of these titles without the XCP software.

Taiwan’s largest maker of optical disc drives (ODDs) Lite-On IT, in response to the formation of a new joint venture between Sony and NEC to design, produce and market ODDs, said that the company will be carefully monitoring the situation, according to general manager Michael Gong for the company’s Optical Disc Drive Business.

Sony and NEC have reached a basic agreement to set up an optical disk drive joint venture. The companies will work together from now to reach agreement on a final contract. Sony will hold a 55% stake in the new company while NEC's stake will be 45%. Sony and NEC will make preparations to transfer their respective optical disc drive operations to the Joint Venture, targeting a business start on April 1, 2006.