Amazon made its anticipated entry into renting DVDs over the Internet, launching a service in the United Kingdom that the world's largest retailer says will charge up to 30 percent less than its competitors.

Gordon Yeh, CEO of Taiwan’s second-largest optical-disc maker, Ritek, stated global demand for DVD+R/-R discs will grow to 3.8 billion discs in 2005, while supply may only rise to 3.6 billion discs, based on projections made by the Japanese research firm Fujiwara-Rothchild.

Pioneer has released a new firmware for the DVR-108 series. The new firmware release brings the drive up to version 1.18 from the previous 1.14 firmware. The firmware mainly increases the burning compatability for new 16x media and can be downloaded here.

An all-new type of media disc, which is to combine the DVD standard with an all-new high definition format, has been developed by Toshiba and Memory-Tech.

Britain leads its European neighbours in the number of remote controls cluttering up each household. A recent survey of 5,500 families in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Italy and the UK found that over half of UK homes have five or more remote controls in the house.

CMC Magnetics, the largest producer of blank optical discs in Taiwan, plans to raise its OEM quotation for CD-R discs from US$0.135 (7p) to US$0.14 (7.2p) in January 2005, with a further increase to US$0.15 (7.8p) in February, according to the company.

Volume production of FVD (forward versatile disc) players, Taiwan’s self-developed DVD standard, will begin early next year, according to the Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories (OES) under the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).

Press Release: Interact-TV, a leading developer of home entertainment servers, has expanded its Telly Home Entertainment Server line by introducing the new TeraTelly model GS1250 with 1.2 Terabytes of digital media storage in a compact device ideal for any stereo cabinet or entertainment center.

The potential pirating of movies remains a major concern for Time Warner, and that's one reason the company is advocating the new HD-DVD platform, according to Chief Executive Richard Parsons.

By the second half of next year, 8x slim-type DVD burners should replace slim-type Combo drives as the mainstream optical disc drive (ODD) used in notebook PCs, according to leading Taiwan ODD makers.

Press Release: Disc Makers has introduced its newest line of Reflex duplicators, the ReflexMax1, ReflexMax4, ReflexMax7, and ReflexUltra. The towers are built with the latest 52x CD-R and 16x DVD±R/48x CD-R Plextor drives.

OEM quotations for 16x DVD burners, which had been remaining stable at US$60-65 for a few months, recently fell to US$55-58 due to increasing competition to meet orders from Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and other international PC brands, according to Taiwan makers of optical disc drives (ODDs).

CMC Magnetics, Ritek and Prodisc Technology, the three top producers of optical discs in Taiwan, will not participate in the ongoing cutting of OEM prices for CD-R and DVD+R/-R discs, according to the companies.

Illegal CDs, DVDs, computer software and games worth £10m have been seized in central Scotland. Twenty-eight people have been arrested in raids on houses and markets in Falkirk, Stirling, Tullibody and Grangemouth over the past five days.

Net users are getting the chance to fight back against spam websites. Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

The portable playstation from Sony appears to be so rare and sought after that finding machines is turning into a quest, according to a report.

Press Release: DualDisc and DVD(plus) discs have until now been devoid of graphics, apart from limited text on the inner ring. Because both sides of these CD/DVD hybrids contain optical data, it has been impossible to apply graphics to them. But MediaCoat technology from Spectra Systems, a developer of systems for marking, tracking and authenticating documents and products, has opened the door to graphics, text and barcodes on the "play" side of a disc.

Pirated copies of the latest blockbuster films and computer games were back on sale at Ingliston Market in Edinburgh this weekend - just a week after a massive raid by police and Trading Standards officers.

Software pirates' increasing skill at creating counterfeit versions of Windows XP has prompted Microsoft to introduce a pilot program that offers to verify whether consumers' software is legitimate and replace fake versions with authentic goods.

A report from security firm Secunia described a hole in Winamp as "highly critical". The hole, reported by Brett Moore, describes a boundary error which can be used to deceive users into going to a malicious web site.