Thanks to disQworld we have been given permission to use a review by red321 on that forum. The review details a number of facts and issues surrounding the popular Sony drives, including useful info on firmware and different media format capabilities. Click for Sony Drives Overview.

If you watch movies on a laptop or on an LCD monitor, you may like to check out CyberLink PowerDVD 5 Deluxe ($69 ~ £41). The newest version introduces a technology called CyberLink Eagle Vision (CLEV) that will make you wonder how you ever watched movies on LCDs before. Even CRTs benefit to some degree.

A plea agreement has been reached in the case of the college student who leaked details of DirectTV's anti-piracy technology, while elsewhere DirecTV lawyers move against a message board poster for giving hacking advice to satellite pirates.

More than a million pounds' worth of mobile phones and games consoles were nicked from a lorry parked outside a Carphone Warehouse store near Birmingham earlier this week.

The Motion Picture Association and the Malaysian government have raided operators of five Web sites suspected of selling illegal DVDs, in the film industry's latest attack on Internet piracy.

Western Europeans are being offered a new ITunes-like digital music store that is accessed through Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 Series software. The pay-per-song service launched Thursday in the U.K. and is being branded by both the MSN Music Club and the Tiscali Music Club. The store draws from On Demand Distribution's music catalog of more than 200,000 tracks from the five major labels and a handful of independents.

In a move that may speed the death of floppy disk drives, M-Systems on Tuesday said its USB flash memory storage device can now start a PC's boot-up process.

Press Release: InterVideo have announced that its family of WinDVD video editing and Digital Video Recorder (DVR) software have been enhanced with a new Dolby Digital Consumer Encoder (DDCE). With the new two-channel Dolby Digital audio encoder you can now create DVDs with high-quality Dolby sound for a more in-depth listening experience.

Digital song-tracking company Audible Magic is striking a deal with Universal Music Group for song information, getting another leg up in its quest to be able to identify--and potentially block--music as it is transferred online. The new arrangement, expected to be announced Tuesday, will see Universal give Audible Magic a "fingerprint," or digital identification tool, for each song it releases, before albums are shipped to retailers. The company uses those fingerprints to identify copyrighted songs online or in other venues such as CD-manufacturing plants to help guard against unauthorized copying.

Press Release: 321 Studios, the software house behind the popular DVD X Copy, have announced the release of its latest breakthrough in asset protection technology: DVD X Rescue and CD X Rescue. These two new products recover and restore data from unreadable, scratched, corrupt or defective DVDs or CDs (CD-R and CD RW.) Utilizing a DVD or CD burner, DVD X Rescue and CD X Rescue create brand new, perfectly playable DVDs or CDs from the damaged original.

In a bid to show it is living up to its WTO obligations, China has pulverized 42 million smuggled and pirated CDs and DVDs.

Hewlett-Packard have introduced the DVD Movie Writer dc3000 as one of it's 158 new products. When connected to a computer and VCR, the device transfers content from VHS or other tapes to DVDs.

Our regular contributor Flash has contacted us very excited. The reason? He's been helping to beta test a new software which he rates very highly. DVDInfoPro is a tool which combines the functionality of other DVD info tools like ADVDinfo, CDSpeed and DiscInfo into one neatly designed package. DVDInfopro gives full details of the functionalities and speeds of all types of DVD and CD drives and full information for inserted DVD media. You can find this fine piece of software with screenshots and the latest downloads here. Nb: the software is updated regularly.

HP plans to introduce a number of specialized PCs in the coming weeks, including a desktop machine aimed specifically at gamers. The new PCs will serve as a follow-on to the collection of scanners, cameras and printers that HP introduced on Monday as part of a strategy aimed at convincing consumers to stick with HP for all of their tech purchases.

The Japanese company Nintendo has temporarily halted production of its GameCube consoles until the autumn. The struggling games maker says it needs to clear its warehouses of unsold machines before it makes any more of them.

Strict antitrust sanctions that European regulators are contemplating against Microsoft could lead to a clash with US authorities and put the software giant in a quandary about whether to sell separate US and European versions of Windows.

Microsoft is to update its Xbox consoles with a new, cheaper TV output system. Focus Enhancements' FS454 chip is now shipping to Microsoft for incorporation into future consoles.

Apple announced yesterday that DVD Studio Pro 2.0, the company's professional level DVD mastering solution will start shipping August 18. DVD Studio contains several new features and has been "rebuilt from the ground up" for Mac OS X using Cocoa, according to Apple.

Taiwan-based Asustek Computer presented its own-brand 4x half-height DVD-Dual drive at a product launch event yesterday, saying it expects to ship 10-12 million optical storage drives in 2003, compared to six million units sold last year. The new DVD drive, DRW-0402P/D, uses Pioneer’s pick-up heads (PUHs) and NEC’s chip sets, and enables 4x writing speed with DVD-R discs, 2x with DVD-RW, 4x with DVD+R and 2.4x with DVD+RW. It also allows 16x writing for CD-R and 10x for CD-RW discs, according to the company.

Press Release: Thrill-seeking fans and athletes can burn their favorite songs, photos, even extreme sports stats to Memorex Action X CD-R media, the first CD-R media geared toward the extreme sports culture. Memorex brings adventure to the front of each disc with surfing, skateboarding, motocross, snowboarding and BMX biking disc prints.