Topic: News

Men of a certain age and income are indulging in a new type of furtive pleasure that involves specialist magazines and select websites, and culminates in wads of cash changing hands. They may appear to be buying expensive electronic goods, but to the men in question the pleasure is derived almost entirely from the build-up to the purchase.

There's division in the ranks of the DVD Forum, whose steering committee will meet in New York next week to vote on a next-generation optical-disk format. Sixty companies took part in the forum's technical working group to develop the high-definition (HD-DVD) format, and some of them are also members of the opposing Blu-ray Disc ROM (BD-ROM) camp. Blu-ray was developed by 10 powerful consumer electronics companies, including Sony, Philips, Hitachi, Sharp and Samsung. All 10 are members of the DVD Forum's steering committee.

In a scenario that seems only too familiar in multimedia technologies, two rival formats are competing to become the standard format for all our metadata. Metadata is the information that is stored along with multimedia files that helps identify the file to different players and applications. For example, an Mp3 music track may contain metadata about the tracks title, artist, album, genre etc. The two standards for this data, HighMAT and Music Photo Video now look set on a head-on collision.

Internet users who distribute movies and music ahead of their release dates could face up to five years in prison under a proposed US bill. Surreptitious videotaping of movies in cinemas would is also set to be outlawed.

It was too good a deal to pass up: buy one DVD at full price and get five more for 49 cents each. So good in fact that two brothers answered the newspaper ad, not just once, or twice, but 675 times, using a different name with each order, according to US police.

A continuing boom in DVD sales will compensate for shrinking prices for the movie discs, Cinram International Inc. executives assured investors Wednesday, predicting holiday sales will be the strongest in the company's history.

Sony has announced internal and external drives that sport the DVD Alliance's 8-speed DVD+R spec.
The internal drive (DRU-530A) will be available from next month for £152 ex VAT, while the external one (DRX-530UL) will be available from January at a price yet to be confirmed.

Sony has launched a portable personal digital video player under its Vaio brand in Japan. The GigaPocket PCVA-HVP20 features a 20GB hard drive, enough to hold up to 31 hours of programming - if you're pretty frugal with image quality.

Press Release: Pioneer Europe the leader in recordable DVD technology, today announces a multiple format DVD/CD internal writer the DVR-A07. The drive enables high-speed recording at 8x on both DVD-R and +R media. The DVR-A07 will be available in January 2004 at an approximate price of EUR300 (£208).

According to a press release on their website, Philips has demonstrated the world's highest ever recording speed of recordable DVD (DVD+R) in an experimental set-up built at Philips Research. The system is able to record at 16x on DVDs, allowing to burn a DVD+R with video or data up to the maximum capacity in less than 6 minutes.

Gateway have announced its first DVD recorder, priced at $349 (£208) the Gateway AR-230 DVD Recorder aims to make VCRs a thing of the past.

Press Release: Memorex have announced the launch of its new dual format 8x DVD recorder. The Memorex 8X Dual-X Drive offers support for eight recording and playback formats, a sleek silver and black design, a comprehensive software bundle, and a host of precision recording technologies designed to enhance reliability during high speed burns. The new drive writes to DVD+R discs at 8X, DVD-R discs at 4X and CD-R discs at 40X; rewrites DVD+RW discs at 4X, DVD-RW discs at 4X and CD-RW discs at 24X; and reads DVD-ROM at 12X and CD-ROM at 40X speeds. It has a suggested price of $229.99 (£137).

The Nokia N-Gage mobile phone has been hyped in recent months as a next generation handheld gaming device with MP3 player and wireless browser capabilities. Games that have been designed for the N-Gage were intended to be device specific. Not anymore though as cracked versions of the games can be played on other mobile phones as well such as the Siemens SX.

Iomega is planning to launch two removable magnetic-based storage formats next year, one aimed at small and medium enterprises and the other at consumer users. The first of the two to be launched, Removable Rigid Disk (RRD), will offer a capacity of 35GB per cartridge and is targeted primarily at small and medium enterprises, said Scott Sheehan, vice president of business development at Iomega. The cartridge contains the media platter and spindle motor parts of a hard disk, while the drive includes the read/write head, eject mechanism, and interface.

Press Release: Ulead have unveiled their latest major release of DVD Workshop. Version 2 maintains the straightforward, design-centric workflow of the original, while offering more professional DVD authoring features. These features include multiple subtitle and audio tracks, playlists and professional output with support for Digital Linear Tape (DLT) and dual layer DVDs (DVD-9). DVD Workshop 2 targets creative professionals who want to produce sophisticated DVDs with a minimal learning curve.

The prices for CD-R discs will rise moderately to US$0.20-0.25 (12p-15p) in 2004, compared with US$0.20-0.22 (12p-13p) currently, according to sources at leading Taiwan-based suppliers.

Sony Music, home to such artists as Beyonce Knowles and Bruce Springsteen, says it plans to introduce new CD technology in Germany that prevents users from copying songs to file-sharing sites, but allows them to make copies for their personal use.

The multimillion-pound black market in bootleg films and CDs in Scotland is thriving because prosecutors let criminals off the hook, it was claimed last night.

At an Apple financial analyst conference on Wednesday CEO Steve Jobs admitted that Apple makes no revenue from the online download service, the iTunes Music Store, that he launched in April. As iTMS is the leading download service, with 80 per cent market share (or so Jobs claimed), where's your 99 cents per song going?

Fuji have said it plans to raise prices on its recordable compact discs by 10-15 percent, citing supply shortages because of an increased demand for DVD discs. The price rise in CD-R and CD-RW media by Fuji, best known for its camera film, follows similar announcements in recent months from rivals Memorex and Maxell of America.