Topic: News

Universal Music's UK wing is to bring the 8cm CD back from the dead later this month, in a desperate bid to revive the singles market. The 'new' format will be called Pocket CD, but is essentially the compact CD developed in the mid-1980s as the format for CD singles.

NEC have announced a chipset for rewritable DVD drives that supports a 16x recording speed in the DVD-R and DVD+R formats.

Sharp have announced the release of five new DVD video recorders. Set to hit the market July 30, the DV-HRD200 features a 400GB hard drive that is capable of recording up to 34 hours of high-quality digital video.

An analyst firm has warned that the price of the future Playstation 3 console could be as high as $500 (£275), due to its expected added media features. Industry analysts Michael Pachter and Edward Woo, who authored the Wedbrush Morgan Securities report, reckon that Sony will try to flog the PS3 off with way more functionality than current consoles, including among others digital video recorder, or DVR and a DVD burner.

Matsushita, better known by its Panasonic brand name, will unveil its first Blu-ray Disc recorder next week, the Osaka, Japan-based company have announced.

Specs rumoured for Xbox's successor, codenamed Xenon, have allegedly been leaked to an Xbox-fanatic website. An anonymous e-mailer supplied the supposed hardware specifications for the Xenon CPU as being powered by a 3.5 GHz IBM PowerPC processor, and a 500+Mhz ATI graphics processor. Apparently, "Xenon" runs an operating system based on Windows NT, very similar to the Xbox operating system. A superset of Microsoft's Direct3D 9.0 runs the graphics interface, apparently.

Philips has launched the world's first 16-speed DVD writer, which can burn a disc in less than six minutes, according to the Dutch company. U.S. computer maker Dell will be the first customer for the new DVD burner, sources familiar with the Philips activity have said. Philips and Dell have a partnership to supply each other with products.

Press Release: Alera have announced that it is launching its new DVD/CD Shredder Plus, a destruction device that cuts DVDs, CDs, Floppy Disks and Credit Cards into small unusable strips, permanently preventing unauthorized use. With carbon steel blades and 1/2 horsepower motor, this industrial strength product is designed specifically for shredding DVDs, CDs and Floppy's.

Volume production of 16x DVD+RW burners for Japanese optical drive manufacturers such as Pioneer and Sony and their Taiwanese competitors including BenQ, Lite-On IT and Accesstek may be behind schedule due to a tight supply of LDs (laser diodes), a key component, and a lag in the availability of 16x DVD+R discs, Taiwanese optical disc drive makers indicated.

Flash has noticed an interesting development with Datawrite Yellow v2 4x DVD-R, "I have just been advised by a Datawrite spokesman that some of the new Datawrite Yellows v2 4x speed discs are in fact RITEKG05 media and customers are finding that some of these discs actually burn at 8x speed so do not be surprised if your burning finishes quicker than expected. Evidently the discs that were printed at the Ritek factory were mixed with the RITEKG04 media and wrongly printed with the Datawrite Yellow 4x design. These discs are in 25 tubs sealed at the factory and there is no way of telling the dye stamper without breaking the seal and checking the leadin code. These discs are apparently Grade A and every bit as good as any other G05 disc, so you may be pleasantly surprised when you open your next tub."

A spokesman for Datawrite says the mix-up was at the Ritek factory and they have no intention of increasing the price and are pleased to be able to offer media that is even better value for money than it was before.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has gone on record as a technology maven who thinks that Hollywood should not work with a new technology because of the threat of piracy. Mr. Jobs was speaking more as CEO of Pixar when he made the comments at a supposedly private meeting with Hollywood and tech execs.

The newest 16X DVD burners that will be shipping soon will run into the same physical limits as CD-ROM drives, ending the "X race" of faster and faster speeds.

A Dutch company's cunning plan to deliver DVD movies to customers' TV sets digitally without having to pay additional performance rights has already run into trouble. Dvdstream's partner Homelink - the Danish manufacturer of the Palmbutler 600 set-top box - has gone into receivership and may not be able to deliver the hardware on time.

The games industry is poised to launch an aggressive anti-DVD copy software drive, with some of the biggest names in the sector targeting programs which, it has been claimed, are widely used to copy DVD-based game discs.

Apple's pioneering online music service iTunes has launched in the UK, Germany and France, offering more than 700,000 songs for 79p or 0.99 euros each.

Flash has contacted us because he has been in correspondence with Ritek about some of the shoddy DVD-Rs which have thankfully washed up less and less on the European market. An update to that article can be found here.

The DVD Forum has given is official thumbs-up to DualDisc, a DVD/CD hybrid format. The approval paves the way for a more rapid adoption of the DVD Audio format. DualDisc essentially sticks a CD onto the back of a DVD or DVD Audio disc. The idea is that punters will be able to, say, play higher quality DVD Audio content at home and use the same disc to play the same music in their car's CD player.

Researchers have observed a new type of liquid crystal - long theorised, but not observed until now - that promises faster and cheaper liquid crystal displays.

Video Island, a UK online DVD rental service, has raised £6m in a funding round to expand it's business. The firm, which launched in September 2003, said it would use the money to expand its business in the UK, its sole market.

RealNetworks has finally got its hands on a movie service to show-piece its own video player alongside its market leading Rhapsody online music service. It has done it in a deal with Starz Encore, the cable TV film supplier, which was cut two years ago, but which is finally going ahead after what appear to be legal delays.